Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday that his administration will soon start housing migrant families with children in a “semi-congregate” facility in Brooklyn — a move that appears at odds with city and state shelter rules.
Under the city’s decades-old right-to-shelter mandate, children should not be housed in congregate, barrack-style settings. The prohibition is based on state rules stipulating that homeless kids should only be housed in family-style shelters with separate rooms that allow for privacy, a restriction advocates say protects minors from sexual abuse and other dangers.
Despite those regulations, Adams’ office said in a statement Monday afternoon that his administration will start placing migrant families with kids in a “semi-congregate” shelter it’s building at Floyd Bennett Field, a defunct U.S. military airstrip near Jamaica Bay in southern Brooklyn. The site, once up and running in a few weeks, is expected to have capacity for about 500 asylum-seeking families with kids, according to City Hall’s statement. The statement also said that “privacy dividers with locks will be installed” to separate households from each other.
Adams also announced that his administration will start limiting city shelter stays for migrant families with kids to 60 consecutive days, confirming an exclusive Daily News report from Friday revealing that a new rule was imminent. According to Adams’ office, families with kids will be provided with “intensified casework services” during those 60 days with an aim of helping them move out of the city’s care and find their own housing.
The 60-day restriction, which took effect Monday, builds on a similar policy that limits consecutive shelter stays for single adult migrants to 30 days.
If a single adult migrant can’t secure their own housing in that time, they can return to the city’s Roosevelt Hotel asylum seeker arrival center to reapply for shelter. An Adams spokesman said the same reapplication process will be available to families with kids.
The new restrictions related to kids come as the Adams administration continues to house more than 64,100 migrants in city shelters and emergency housing facilities, according to City Hall data. They also come as lawyers for the mayor continue to argue in court that the administration should get permission to suspend right to shelter, which requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who requests it.
The Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless, which are fighting the administration’s push to roll back right to shelter in court, said the Floyd Bennett Field plan “raises serious legal questions” and hinted they may take legal action to block it.
“Private rooms, not open cubicles, are needed to ensure the safety of families with children and to reduce the transmission of infectious disease, among other obvious reasons,” the groups said in a joint statement. “We are still waiting for specifics, but, should this plan contradict the Boston consent decree (which guarantees the legal right to shelter for homeless families with minor children) or relevant laws, we will have no choice but to seek an immediate injunction from the court.”
Of the new 60-day rule for migrant families with kids, Legal Aid and the Coalition slammed it as being “devoid of any humanity.”
“This new policy … will disrupt access to education, which has provided much needed stability for our newest neighbors, and also cause chaos for school administrators,” their statement said. “We are also concerned about access to medical care and other vital services.”
Adams spokesman Charles Lutvak said the right-to-shelter concerns are addressed by the “privacy dividers” the administration is setting up at the Floyd Bennett Field site.
The Adams administration has placed migrant children in congregate settings before.
This past May, The News reported that the administration was housing several migrant families with kids in an old NYPD training facility in apparent violation of the rules against sheltering kids in congregate settings.
At the time, Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park said the gym wasn’t supposed to be a long-term accommodation for anyone, but rather a place where migrants could stay while the city found space in shelters or hotels.
In a statement released Monday along with the press release on the Floyd Bennett Field plan, Adams said roughly 600 new migrants continue to come to the city every day on average and reiterated that his administration needs immediate help from the federal government to slow the pace of arrivals.
“With the current surge we’re seeing, a comprehensive, coordinated effort from the federal government to decompress the pressure New York City is under is needed now,” the mayor said.
___
© 2023 New York Daily News
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
