New York City Comptroller Brad Lander called for the end of the Adams administration’s caps on shelter stays for migrants — while thousands still pour into the Big Apple each month.
“This is not a policy designed or implemented to help families achieve stable housing and self-sufficiency and integrate into our city,” Lander said Thursday outside the Roosevelt Hotel.
“It was a policy designed to churn people through a system, to subject them to screening after screening, and to push them out of the shelter system with no regard for where they landed, with no regard for the impact on their kids’ education and with no regard for their actual path to stable housing, employment and self-sufficiency.”
The city’s accountant railed against the limit for asylum-seeking families in front of the city’s welcome center, citing his office’s five-month investigation into the police enacted earlier this year by Mayor Eric Adams, who has touted the policy as a key measure and helping migrants exit the city’s shelter system.
More than half of the families in the city’s care had moved on from shelters as of last month with the administration crediting the 60-day limit as the main driver as city staffers worked with families to ensure they were getting proper housing.
Just over 10,000 families, made up of 19,497 adults and 18,149 kids, have been given a 60-day notice as of April 28, according to the comptroller’s office.
Fifty-one percent of those families have left the city’s shelters, the data showed.
For the past few months between 1,200 and 1,500 new asylum seekers have arrived each week, a significant dip from the last year’s highs when that tally neared 4,000 over some seven-day stretches.
At the same time, the number of migrants in the city’s care has held steady at around 65,000, according to figures from City Hall.
The comptroller’s investigation into the family limit criticized the administration for a “haphazard” rollout of the policy with little information provided to staff or families on exemptions for reapplying for shelter.
The probe also found that the city’s “intensive case management” to assist families exiting the shelters fell short of making the migrants self-sufficient.
“Beyond the cruelty of the policy, our investigation found significant management flaws in how City Hall is administering these evictions and how poorly they are tracking outcomes,” Lander said, adding, “Our City can do so much better.”
In addition to his call for the end of the limits, Lander recommended more case management and education for the asylum seekers in the city’s care and tracking its effectiveness in obtaining permanent and work authorizations for migrants.
Calls to City Hall about the investigation were not immediately returned.
