Desperate: NYC seeks 750 more sites to house asylum seekers amid migration crisis

New York City officials are reviewing around 750 sites that could potentially house the thousands of migrants flooding into the city. 

The administration of Mayor Eric Adams has struggled to house the more than 73,000 undocumented migrants that have traveled from the southern border to the Big Apple since last spring. Last week alone, more than 2,200 migrants arrived in the city. 

“We have reached a point where the system is buckling,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams Isom said Wednesday during a briefing on the migrant plight.

The announcement comes as Mayor Adams requested to suspend the city’s “right to shelter” regulation last week because the city does not have enough “resources and capacity to establish and maintain shelter sites, staffing, and security to provide safe and appropriate shelter.” 

Currently, the city is providing housing to around 95,000 individuals across 157 designated emergency sites that the administration has set up across New York’s five boroughs. An estimated 45,800 migrants of those being housed by the city are migrants. 

With the shelters running out of space to take in more individuals, the city has transformed schools, cruise ship terminals, and hotels into shelters for asylum seekers. This week, city officials announced that a former jail in Harlem would be repurposed to house asylum seekers. 

It is unclear what locations city officials are reviewing as possible housing options in the city. However, New York Governor Kathy Hochul talked about the possibility of using dormitories at SUNY campuses in upstate New York as a temporary solution. 

“We took the model that we use at New York City Emergency Management to bill to open up coastal storm shelters and adapted that — providing a temporary place for us to shelter asylum seekers as they are waiting for placement in other facilities,” Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol said.  

“They are not long term, they are midterm solutions. They are ‘waiting rooms,’ they are temporary placement while we wait for other spaces to open up to move them into,” he added.