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By Chris Sommerfeldt
New York Daily News
New York (TNS) — Hundreds of beds in the city’s shelter system sat vacant while a large group of migrants were sleeping on a Manhattan sidewalk for several nights in a row earlier this summer, according to data obtained by the Daily News. headline news
The data undercuts Mayor Eric Adams’ repeated claim that his administration could not find any shelter beds for the roughly 200 mostly male migrants, who as a result resorted to sleeping on the street outside Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel, which is being used by the city as an intake center for asylum seekers.
The dire scene in front of the Roosevelt played out between July 29 and Aug. 3, and some of the impacted migrants spent all five nights on the curb.
The data, compiled by the Department of Homeless Services, shows there were more than 700 vacant beds in the city’s traditional shelter system specifically meant for single male adults on each of the five nights the migrants bedded down in front of the Roosevelt.
An Adams administration official, who would only speak on condition of anonymity so he could freely explain the city’s policies, said Monday that the migrants languishing outside the Roosevelt did not get those available beds because the city “does not allow for overlap between asylum seekers and longtime New Yorkers experiencing homelessness in our shelter system since they are distinct populations with distinct needs.”
The official acknowledged that the administration has not always differentiated between migrants and New Yorkers in need when it comes to placement in the Department of Homeless Services’ traditional shelter system. The official would not say when that new policy took place during the migrant crisis.
There is another longtime policy in place at the Department of Homeless Services generally requiring the agency to keep 5% vacancy rates across its shelter populations in order to have buffers of extra beds in the event of emergencies.
During the five night-period when migrants slept outside the Roosevelt, the data obtained by The News show that rate reached its lowest on Aug. 2, when 6.14% of all available beds for single male adults sat vacant — above the threshold that the departments prefers to maintain. On the four other nights migrants camped outside the Roosevelt, the vacancy rates for single adults were even higher, according to the data:
July 29: 837 vacant beds, 6.98% of total capacity
July 30: 831 vacant beds, 7.09% of total capacity
July 31: 761 vacant beds, 6.37% of total capacity
Aug. 1: 702 vacant beds, 6.16% of total capacity
Aug. 3: 749 vacant beds, 6.76% of total capacity
Over the same time span, there were also hundreds of additional beds in the shelter system available each night for single adult women, according to the data. The vacancy rates for shelter beds set aside for single women never dipped below 11% during those five nights, according to the data.
Dave Giffen, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, which exclusively provided The News with the vacancy rate data, said it’s preposterous that migrants slept outside the Roosevelt for days while hundreds of shelter beds sat empty.
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“The city should always use all resources at its disposal to make sure that nobody is left sleeping on the streets,” said Giffen, whose organization receives shelter vacancy rate data from the city in its capacity as a court-appointed watchdog of the shelter system.
Josh Goldfein, a lawyer at the Legal Aid Society who is challenging the Adams administration in court over its attempt to suspend the city’s right-to-shelter mandate, also said the administration official’s claim that the city doesn’t place migrants with homeless New Yorkers is nonsensical.
“It does not make any sense. They’re placing migrants every day in the DHS system with homeless New Yorkers,” Goldfein said, using an acronym for the Department of Homeless Services.
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Since the Roosevelt dilemma, some homeless advocates and Democratic elected officials have accused the Adams administration of deliberately letting migrants sleep outside as a tactic for displaying in a stark way that the city needs a lot more financial and logistical help from President Biden and Gov. Hochul.
In a City Council hearing this past Friday, Brooklyn Councilman Lincoln Restler pointed to another data-set as alleged proof of that theory: The total census for adult males in the shelter system was lower by 1,500 individuals during the Roosevelt incident as compared to six weeks prior.
“Human suffering was used as a political pawn,” Restler, a progressive Democrat, said of the Roosevelt scene. “I agree very much that the state and federal government need to step up, but what we saw on the street of the Roosevelt Hotel was a disgrace to every single person who works for the city.”
Adams administration officials have vehemently denied the notion that they would use images of migrants sleeping on the streets as part of a political ploy to pressure state and federal partners for more aid.
“Any implication that the city would keep people from beds that could serve them appropriately is not only egregiously mistaken but also deeply offensive to the thousands of public servants working tirelessly every day,” Adams spokesman Charles Lutvak said Monday.
Goldfein, the Legal Aid lawyer, said he understands why the city wants to maintain a 5% shelter capacity vacancy to be able to act with flexibility during emergencies.
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“But this was an emergency,” he said of migrants camping outside the Roosevelt. “Those people should not have had to sleep on the street.”
Furthermore, given that the vacancy rate never fell below the 5% threshold during the Roosevelt incident, Goldfein said it should have been a no-brainer for the administration to give the empty beds to the migrants who slept outside the hotel.
“They should have used all those vacant beds at least as a bridge for a few days until the new facilities open,” he said, referring to tent-style shelters with a joint capacity for 4,000 migrants that are about to open on Randalls Island and in the parking lot of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens.
The revelations about the city’s shelter vacancies come as the Adams administration continues to scramble to accommodate the tens of thousands of mostly Latin American migrants who have arrived in the city since last year.
According to data from Adams’ office, more than 57,000 migrants remain housed in traditional shelters as well as emergency hotels and tent facilities. Adams said last week that the city now expects to spend as much as $12 billion on sheltering, feeding and providing services for migrants by July 2025 as hundreds more continue to arrive every week.
While disputing that his administration would deliberately let migrants sleep on the streets, Adams has recently highlighted the Roosevelt incident as a key reason why federal and state governments must provide more help.
“The dam has burst, we saw that in front of the Roosevelt Hotel,” he said Sunday on his semi-regular WBLS radio show. “We know we have to have a real response to this, and we need the national and state partners to continue to assist in making sure that we can manage this crisis.”
©2023 New York Daily News. Visit at nydailynews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
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