City Hall now booting up to 600 migrants from strained shelter system under new 60-day rule
The number of migrants being booted from the city’s overwhelmed shelter system under its controversial 60-day rule has ballooned from 100 to up to 600 in just the past week.
The soaring tally, provided by City Hall on Tuesday, comes two weeks after the Adams administration rolled out the “extraordinary” policy limiting shelter stays for single adult asylum-seekers to two months — and as migrants flooding the Big Apple’s massive Manhattan intake center are now sleeping on the street for days while waiting to be placed.
Adams argued that the measure was necessary because the number of people in the city’s care has swelled to more than 100,000 in the past year, fueled by newly arriving immigrants.
“This is exactly what we were fearing would happen,” said city Councilwoman Diana Ayala (D-Harlem), referring to migrants receiving eviction notices under the rule, as well as sleeping on the street because of backlogs.
“If we run out of beds, what we thought would happen is happening,” she told The Post.
Officials have said the staggering migrant influx is forcing them to again consider opening temporary facilities — dubbed tent cities by homeless advocates — in city parks and parking lots to provide some measure of shelter to the asylum-seekers, many of whom say they are fleeing political violence and economic instability in South America and the Caribbean.
Heartbreaking photos of dozens of recent arrivals forced to sleep on cardboard in front of Manhattan’s temporary intake center, the Roosevelt Hotel, have grabbed the city’s attention and put City Hall back on the defensive — all as Hizzoner attempts to turn up the political heat on President Biden in Washington to provide more aid.
The most recent tallies show that roughly 103,000 people are staying in the shelter system or other city-run facilities.
Critics have slammed the 60-day rule, saying thereis little chance for homeless New Yorkers to find a new place to live within two months of entering the shelter system as the Big Apple’s housing crisis turns apartment-hunting even for those who can afford market-rate units into a months-long affair.
The annual Mayor’s Management Report revealed that the average stay in a shelter for single adults was 509 days long in 2022 — just shy of a year and a half.
