Ready to blow: NY shelter population hits record 62K as migrants keep coming
The number of people in the Big Apple’s already overwhelmed shelter system hit a new record this week as buses filled with asylum-seeking migrants continue to arrive from the southern border, records show.
The city Department of Homeless Services’ tally hit a new record of 62,174 people living in city shelters on Monday.
It was the fourth day in a row when the tally exceeded the previous record of 61,415 set in January 2019 as the homelessness crisis reached its apex under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio.
“The increase in the shelter census is fueled by rising numbers of people entering the system, by bureaucratic bottlenecks precluding residents from transitioning into permanent and safe affordable housing quickly,” Legal Aid and the Coalition for the Homeless said in a joint statement.
Mayor Eric Adams declared an emergency on Friday and predicted it would cost $1 billion to house and provide social services for the now-18,600 recent arrivals from the southern border.
An estimated 14,100 are living in city shelters — accounting for nearly one out of every four people in the system. Most are from Venezuela and are seeking asylum after fleeing the country’s brutal dictatorship and economic collapse.
“This is unsustainable,” Hizzoner said in a speech that day.
City officials estimate that at least 1,000 migrants have arrived per week in recent months with a half-dozen or more buses pulling into the Port Authority almost everyday. But Mayor Adams said Monday close to 2,000 had arrived over the past week.
Additionally, the tallies released Wednesday by the two groups show that the average length of stay for those stuck in a shelter has continued to balloon: Families with children are now waiting an average of 534 days to secure permanent housing, while the wait for single adults now stretches 509 days.
The ballooning waits come as New York’s housing crisis — decades in the making — has exploded into plain view in recent months. Average rents have soared across the city and even crossed the $4,000-a-month mark in Manhattan as vacancy rates plummeted.
New York City built just 200,000 new apartments and homes in the 2010s even as the five boroughs added more than 700,000 jobs, a mismatch that has been squeezing neighborhoods for years.