Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams agree: There are plenty of state-controlled properties suitable for housing migrants. They just don’t agree on which ones.
In court-ordered correspondence over the last week, both their offices listed the types of sites they’ve eyed for temporary housing and humanitarian facilities as the city grapples with a continuing wave of migrants arriving in the five boroughs.
Their lists diverge significantly. Adams wants to house people at places like the Javits Center, state college dorms and “vacant upstate summer camps.” Hochul offered up gymnasiums in state parks and New York City colleges, armories in Harlem and Brooklyn and even the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens — none of which appealed to the mayor, according to the state’s missives.
The dueling letters, which were first obtained by the New York Times, lay bare a behind-the-scenes struggle to reach consensus that had previously been kept from public view. The dispute comes as the Adams administration and migrant advocates call on Hochul to craft a more comprehensive statewide plan for sheltering the new arrivals, many of whom are asylum-seekers.
“This problem needs to be solved, and the state and the city each have obligations and they each have resources that they’re required to use and they should be using,” said Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society, in an interview. “They should be working together to solve the problem. That’s what it’s going to take.”
At the same time, Hochul continues to press the White House on her request to open a temporary shelter at southeast Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, a former federal airfield. The governor says she’s expecting an answer within “the next week or so,” despite the Biden administration publicly keeping quiet.
“I believe that’s going to happen,” she told Spectrum News NY1 on Wednesday. “It’s just a matter of when.”
A behind-the-scenes struggle
New York City is currently providing shelter for 58,500 migrants, according to the mayor’s office. More than 100,000 have sought care at one point or another since spring of last year.
This week, the city opened a tent city with 1,000 beds at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, a state-owned site. Another large-scale shelter is slated for Randall’s Island. The city’s costs will be reimbursed by the state, at an estimated $374 million a year, according to Hochul’s administration.
But the letters between Hochul and Adams’ offices — which were ordered by a state judge as part of the ongoing litigation that established New York’s “right to shelter” mandate in the 1980s — show it’s been a struggle to get to that point.
Hochul’s office claims it identified more than a dozen state sites that could house migrants as far back as October 2022, including cruise terminals, facilities at Roberto Clemente State Park in the Bronx and Riverbank State Park in Manhattan, as well as armories in Harlem and Brooklyn.
The city turned many of them down for “reasons that do not relate to their suitability as shelters,” wrote Faith Gay, a private attorney hired by the Hochul administration after state Attorney General Letitia James withdrew from the right-to-shelter case last week.
On Thursday, Adams said the city had viable reasons for turning down the sites the state flagged.
“The sites that were given to us — some of them are in floodplains, some of them were not suitable to build, and so we analyzed each of these sites,” he said. “We did not ignore any of the sites.”
City officials have their eyes on the Javits Center. The massive state-run convention center features more than 3 million square feet of space and was deployed multiple times during the COVID-19 crisis. The city’s letter, written by assistant corporation counsel Daniel Perez and obtained by Gothamist, claims the state offered up a vacant lot that’s part of the Javits grounds and slated for redevelopment — but not the convention center itself.
“During prior discussions, the state offered to allow the city to accommodate new arrivals within a specific section of the Javitz [sic] Center, Site K,” Perez wrote. “The city concluded, however, that it would prove infeasible to house new arrivals within Site K.”
A push for more federal aid
Hochul said her offer of Aqueduct, Riverbank Park or any of the other sites the state identified still stands.
“They’re still available,” Hochul told NY1. “That’s the point. We’re saying we’re not taking them off the table.”
Publicly, Adams and Hochul continue to present a unified front, despite the court-ordered letters showing clear disagreements behind the scenes. On Wednesday, Adams said the city would sit down with Hochul’s team to explain why the sites the state is offering aren’t workable.
“I like her,” Adams told reporters. “She likes me. And the things that we can learn from each other, we are going to do together.”
The two do agree on one area, however: They both want the federal government to provide more assistance.
For Hochul, that means the approval of a shelter at Floyd Bennett Field, the former World War II naval air station that the National Parks Service now manages as a recreational area.
Hochul has been asking President Joe Biden to stand up a federal shelter at the site since May. For a couple months, her request spurred little movement — though that has changed in recent weeks as Biden’s senior adviser Tom Perez has taken a lead role in discussing the issue with Hochul’s administration.
Perez — who, like Hochul, was born and raised in the Buffalo area — visited New York City last week. Hochul says she’s been in contact with the White House “daily” about her request — but has acknowledged the Department of the Interior has legal concerns about using the property for housing.
On Wednesday, the governor said she and federal representatives were discussing “leases” at Floyd Bennett Field. She believes the property could house up to 2,000 migrants.
“We are pushing hard for Floyd Bennett Field,” she said. “I think that could be a significant development.
The White House did not return a request for comment on her request. But it seems to have the support of U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, a Brooklyn Democrat whose district includes the former airfield.
“We must consider every option to provide aid and shelter to those who have sought refuge, including Floyd Bennett Field,” Jeffries spokesperson Andy Eichar said in a statement.
Includes reporting by Michelle Bocanegra and Arya Sundaram.
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