Tuesday, January 9, 2024
Year : 1, Issue : 19
The Generation Desk: With migrant families facing eviction from the temporary homes where they’ve lived since arriving in New York, Mayor Eric Adams promised Monday that they won’t end up sleeping on the streets.
“This is not going to be a city where we’re going to place children and families on the street and have them sleep on the street,” the mayor said during his weekly press briefing at City Hall. “That’s not going to happen.”
But the evictions come amid a flurry of criticism from elected officials and advocates concerned about the city’s ability to find families shelter, disruptions to education and how the new model of shelters as a revolving door will continue to destabilize families trying to start a new life in New York.
At a rally in Foley Square on Monday calling for Adams to reverse his policy, city Comptroller Brad Lander bashed the 60-day policy, calling it “one of the cruelest things the city has done in generations.”
As of the end of last week, 4,800 families with children had been served 60-day notices mandating they leave the city’s care or reapply for shelter, according to the Adams administration. The eviction dates are staggered.
Forty families at the Row, a hotel-turned-emergency shelter in Midtown Manhattan, will see the first evictions as they collect their belongings and move on Tuesday morning, while children are supposed to be in school. Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project, estimated the city could see 100 families pushed out each day within the next few weeks.
Advocates, other elected officials and migrants themselves are worried that Adams’ promise could be broken in the days and weeks to come, following the experience of single adult migrants who have been forced to leave their temporary homes.
Despite the city’s legally mandated “right to shelter,” migrants have often had to resort to sleeping outside or on trains since the first shelter stay limits went into place for adults. Others have found some respite at a far-off waiting room in the Bronx and other locations, where people have resorted to sleeping on the floor or metal chairs in crowded rooms until receiving a new shelter assignment.
“People thought it was wrong that we did 30-day notice; turned out that it was the right thing to do,” Adams said, pointing to data showing that more than three-fourths of migrants who have received those notices did not reapply to stay in city shelters.
“Let’s be perfectly clear: the 60-day rule is one thing and one thing only — harassment,” said Christine Quinn, who heads the shelter and supportive housing nonprofit Win. “This rule is being put in place because the administration has failed to develop or implement a holistic plan to house and support the asylum seekers. There is no leadership coming out of City Hall.”
Source: NY Daily News
