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Council legislation looks at NYC standards for housing migrants
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Mar 2, 2023
Modified Mar 3, 2023
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Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
By
Catalina Gonella
Published Mar 2, 2023
Modified Mar 3, 2023
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Two new bills introduced by the City Council on Thursday would ensure that the city’s large-scale shelters for asylum-seekers are subject to the same city right-to-shelter standards as traditional shelters.
The right to shelter in New York City — a combination of court orders and local and state laws founded on a landmark 1979 court decision — guarantees homeless people in New York the ability to access shelter and sets minimum standards for those shelters. In January, the mayor questioned whether those standards should apply to migrants given the scale of the current crisis.
While traditional homeless shelters are operated by the Department of Homeless Services, the Adams administration has tasked Health & Hospitals and the Office of Emergency Management with operating the so-called “Humanitarian Emergency Relief and Response Centers,” or HERRCs – a move that advocates said was a deliberate attempt to bypass the right-to-shelter rules.
“It does appear that they're trying to skirt the regulations by creating a different administrative structure to oversee the operation of these shelters designed specifically for people seeking asylum, and in that way, skirting the state regulations that would otherwise apply,” Shelly Nortz at the Coalition for the Homeless told Gothamist. “We don't think that's a good idea.”
When Mayor Eric Adams first announced the plan to open relief centers in the fall, the city said they would be a brief stop for “approximately 24 to 96 hours, but potentially longer depending on the situation,” before migrants move on to longer-term shelter or their final destination.
“I met that with suspicion… as we've seen over the last several months now, these have become facilities where families are living for weeks on end and months on end,” said Councilmember Shahana Hanif, who introduced the bill challenging conditions at migrant shelters on Thursday.
The first bill that Hanif introduced would explicitly require all current and future migrant relief shelters to comply with all standards set under the right-to-shelter law. Those standards include requirements that beds be 30 inches wide and spaced at least 3 feet apart; that residents are provided with toiletries and secure lockers; and that there is a clean, working shower for every 15 residents.
"We are essentially asking that the way we house asylum-seekers and anyone who comes into our city – that whatever we build adheres to the right-to-shelter requirements," Hanif said. "That we won't allow for any circumvention even if other agencies are handling the operations – that there's no excuse to be exempt from the right to shelter."
Conditions at the migrant relief centers, especially mass-scale ones with rows of hundreds of beds in a single room, have raised concerns from advocates. Migrants themselves protested the conditions at a shelter at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook, leading to a stand-off outside the Watson Hotel in Midtown. The mayor also recently closed a tent facility erected on Randall’s Island late last year.
The second bill would require migrants at HERRCs to be notified of their ability to access the DHS shelter system, and guarantee them transportation to an appropriate DHS facility if that is what they choose.
When asked about the bill at a news conference on Thursday, the mayor said his administration would take a close look.
“We like to work with all of our electeds and we're going to look over what this bill is about and then we're going to make the determination based on that,” Adams said.
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Catalina Gonella
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