|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
Edited by: TJVNews.com
NYC Mayor Eric Adams announced Monday that he is limiting shelter stays for migrant families with children to 60 days, bidding to ease pressure on a city housing system overwhelmed by a large influx of asylum seekers over the past year, as was reported by the AP.
The Democrat’s office said it will begin sending 60-day notices to migrant families who live in shelters, though they could reapply for housing if they are unable to find a new place to live. The AP also reported that the city also will provide “intensified casework services” to help families secure housing, according to a news release.
It’s the mayor’s latest attempt to provide relief to the city’s shelter system and finances as it grapples with more than 120,000 international migrants who have come to New York, many without housing or the legal ability to work, according to the AP report. More than 60,000 migrants currently live in city shelters, according to his office.
Adams has estimated the city will spend $12 billion over the next three years to handle the influx, setting up large-scale emergency shelters, renting out hotels and providing various government services for migrants, as was indicated in the AP report.
The mayor last month limited adult migrants to just 30 days in city-run facilities amid overcrowding. The AP reported that Adams is also seeking to suspend a unique legal agreement that requires New York City to provide emergency housing to homeless people. No other major U.S. city has such a requirement.
“With over 64,100 asylum seekers still in the city’s care, and thousands more migrants arriving every week, expanding this policy to all asylum seekers in our care is the only way to help migrants take the next steps on their journeys,” Adams said in a statement, as was noted in the AP report.
Recently Adams took a four-day trip through Latin America, starting in Mexico, where he sought to discourage people from coming to New York by telling them the city’s shelter system is at capacity and that its resources are overwhelmed.
According to a report on Monday on TheCity.nyc web site, City Hall said it would begin distributing notices to families with children telling them they had to leave and reapply for shelter after 60 days, while families with children entering the system would be sent to a cavernous tent shelter at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn when it opens in the coming weeks. Until now, migrant families with children have been placed in individual hotel rooms spread out across the city.
Removed from the nearby neighborhoods of Marine Park and Flatlands, the flood-prone and marshy Floyd Bennett Field, a former airfield, is about a five-mile trip from the nearest schools, according to TheCity.nyc.
In a press release, the administration called the forthcoming facility there a “semi-congregate setting,” saying that “privacy dividers with locks will be installed to provide approximately 500 families with children a place to stay.”
Other than as a brief emergency measure after Hurricane Sandy, the city hasn’t placed families with children in congregate settings since the 1980s, according to Josh Goldfein with the Legal Aid Society, a practice they fought to ban because of the dangers children face in such settings, like their vulnerability to sexual abuse, TheCity.nyc reported.
(Sources: AP.con & TheCity.nyc)
