Mayor Eric Adams has foretold of the coming ‘doom’ the city will experience because of the crippling weight of the asylum seeker crisis for months. With the recent move to limit shelter stays and legal determination to suspend the right to shelter law, he discussed the potential for a spike in street homelessness and an ongoing issue with some migrants resorting to “sex work” to make money.
So far the city has seen over 136,000 people come through and over 64,000 migrants remain under the city’s care.
In a conference on Tuesday, October 31, Adams confirmed there’s been quite a few migrants soliciting sex as work around the clock on Roosevelt Avenue in Queens and in the East New York neighborhood in Brooklyn in recent weeks. He said he has visited the sites firsthand.
“This is what happens when you create an atmosphere that people can’t provide for themselves. You can’t work illegally, you can’t carry out your job. When I talk about the spiraling impact of how this is going to impact our city, this is what I’m talking about. It is going to impact the foundation of the quality of life of our city,” said Adams.
The mayor has repeatedly asked the federal government to expedite work permits and allow newly arrived migrants in the city to at least legally work while seeking asylum. Governor Kathy Hochul echoed that call tremendously, and at least attempted to provide migrants with state-approved work papers in the interim. Adams plans on partnering with law enforcement to aggressively prosecute the “johns” and focus on giving assistance to sex workers to make sure they’re not being forced into illegal activity.
Additionally, numerous women and their small children, sometimes unaccompanied, have been sighted on trains and in the subways selling gum, snacks, candy and other foods to make money.
“And it’s not…it’s not only the financial crisis, but we are going to create generational problems based on the failure of the national government, and that is one example of that, when you have individuals who can’t work, can’t provide for their families, have to turn to illegal activities to do so,” he continued.
Camille Joseph Varlack, chief of staff for the mayor, said that for the last year and a half the city has been managing the response and “doing a fairly exceptional job,” but that’s changing with the continued lack of support from the state and federal government.
“We have also been laser clear that we cannot continue to manage this crisis on our own and have been calling on the federal government for months if not over a year to create a federal decompression strategy so that this national crisis is not sitting on the back of a municipality,” said Varlack.
Another major issue discussed at the conference is that only a small percentage of migrants are reapplying for shelter stays after having to vacate, creating a simmering frustration among the newly arrived immigrant community and advocates.
Several housing and immigration groups traveled to Fort Lee, New Jersey last week to rally outside of Adams’ condo property. They advocated to keep the right to shelter law, that’s currently benefiting the influx of migrants, unchanged. The group also urged Adams to implement City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) vouchers to get people out of shelters and into permanent housing, freeing up space for migrants.
“The mayor needs to stop transferring people from place to place and kicking them out and needs to provide people with shelter until they get housed. We all have a right to shelter and a right to housing. The city has been transferring homeless people and abusing them for years in shelters across the city. Now with the 30 and 60-day rules, the city is continuing that abuse and making it even worse for homeless immigrants,” said Dinick Martinez, leader with the Safety Net Activists, in a statement.
Martinez said that instead of risking an increase in homelessness, the city should use the new CityFHEPS laws and also move people into vacant city apartments in supportive housing, New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), and Housing Connect buildings.
“Getting people into permanent housing must be the number one priority and solution to freeing up space in the city’s overburdened shelter system. Mayor Adams’ callous disregard for the experiences and hardships of unhoused people is clear in his continued attacks on right-to-shelter protections,” said Taina Wagnac, senior manager of state and local policy at New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) in a statement.
Wagnac is adamant that the city can meet the housing needs of New Yorkers and new arrivals by prioritizing humane solutions to reduce homelessness.
Adams commented at the conference that “the City Council passed a law that anyone has the right to sleep on the streets” when asked about how the city is preparing to deal with more street homelessness.
He was referring to the four-bill package expanding the CityFHEPS voucher program that he “didn’t like” and tried to veto back in June of this year. His veto was overridden by a majority in City Council in July. The City Council created the legislative package mostly to counter Adams’ sweeps of homeless encampments across the city, that began in April, and his subsequent mental health initiatives that allowed emergency workers to involuntarily move unhoused on the streets with noted mental illness into medical facilities for care.
“I didn’t like that law because we were trying to make sure that we don’t have what we’re seeing in other cities of encampments all over the place,” said Adams, “The City Council said, no, anyone has the right to sleep on the streets. And now that I say that, you know, some people may be sleeping on the streets, people are like saying, ‘oh, my God, what are you doing?’ Well, you just passed the law. You just passed a law that says anyone should have a right to sleep on the street and there’s nothing we can do about it.”
In response, an unnamed City Council spokesperson fired back in a statement saying that the mayor “inaccurately” framed the bill as allowing people to sleep outside unhoused.
“It’s unfortunate that the mayor would provide the public with bad information about a city law that is not true,” said the spokesperson. “This City Council passed a bill to provide information to people about their existing legal rights under city and state law—it provided no new rights, as was falsely stated, and the mayor allowed it to be enacted into law.”
The spokesperson said that Adams should focus on contingency plans to prevent an increase of people sleeping on city streets “rather than misleading the public.”
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.
They told me to find another drop in center, do ima on the streets again. Drop in centers are great until they want you to be a client. Or else