Four years ago, the New York City commercial real-estate firm RXR unveiled “an exciting new opportunity in Brooklyn.” The Hall, as RXR named the development, comprised ten buildings and more than six hundred thousand square feet of prime office space, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Promotional artist renderings depicted workers dressed in business casual busy in open-plan offices. “THE HALL’S unique workplace campus will activate one of Brooklyn’s most dynamic and authentic communities of makers, creatives, tech-visionaries, artists, architects, foodies and change agents,” RXR wrote.
The pandemic dashed that vision. Makers and change agents worked from home. Commercial real-estate prices in New York City cratered. For three years, the Hall sat mostly empty, and became one of the least promising properties in RXR’s sagging portfolio. Company executives began having conversations with city officials about the possibility of rezoning the Hall as a part-residential, mixed-use building—a messy, expensive, political process.
In the midst of one crisis came another. Last summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of migrants from his state to New York City, in a cruel political stunt. Partly to demonstrate that New York, unlike Texas, was generous and empathetic to new arrivals in America, officials working for Mayor Eric Adams, as well as representatives of local nonprofit and community groups, showed up at the Port Authority Bus Terminal to welcome the migrants. They received information about social services, and the city’s unique right-to-shelter laws, which guarantee that anyone who requests a bed will be provided one. The right to shelter isn’t new—it’s the product of homeless advocates’ legal victories in the nineteen-eighties. But never before had so many immigrants been given detailed instructions on how to enter the shelter system. This information was shared with friends and family, in WhatsApp groups, on social media. People arriving in town—and not just those who came on Abbott’s buses—began exercising their right to shelter. They were soon followed by thousands, which turned into tens of thousands.
When Adams took office, at the beginning of 2022, there were already more than sixty thousand people living in New York City’s shelter system. As more and more migrants arrived, the city government scrambled to find room for them. Entire hotels were rented out, including the defunct Roosevelt Hotel, a thousand-room Jazz Age relic in midtown Manhattan, which became the city’s migrant-intake center. When even the hotel rooms ran out, local officials constructed emergency shelters, like the large tents on Randall’s Island, in the East River, that drew protests from New Yorkers whose kids played soccer on the fields where the tents were pitched.
While office-space vacancy rates were also at historic highs last year, there were initially few companies willing to convert office buildings to migrant shelters. For one thing, office space requires all kinds of modifications to accommodate even short-term habitation: showers, bathrooms, lighting, kitchens, walls. Nevertheless, in the winter, city officials asked local real-estate companies to come forward if they had any kind of space they could spare. At the end of June, as the city’s shelter population neared a hundred thousand, RXR entered into a licensing agreement with New York City Health and Hospitals, the city’s public-health-care network, to build out the Hall into a longer-term, large-capacity migrant shelter, a process that could take several months. In the meantime, according to RXR, the company was asked to quickly build a shorter-term “respite center” in two of the Hall’s buildings with space for four hundred and fifty male migrants. RXR completed the renovations in two weeks.
RXR was paid about thirty thousand dollars a month for building operations of the respite facility, a pittance compared with the kind of revenue the company had been imagining a few years earlier. To staff the respite center, the city government brought in a contractor called MedRite, previously best known for operating a chain of COVID-19 testing facilities around the city. Most of the guards worked for another contractor, Arrow Security. A third company, Mulligan Security, provided fireguards, tasked with mitigating fire hazards and escorting residents out in the case of emergencies. Combined, the three companies had been awarded contracts that allow them to bill the city for nearly half a billion dollars a year.
In July and August, buses filled with migrants arrived at the Hall nearly every day—even after the respite center surpassed four hundred and fifty residents. By midsummer, nearly eight hundred men lived in the Hall. Each person was checked in at a table on the first floor, given a facility I.D. and a lanyard, handed a stack of registration documents, offered a snack, and provided with a towel, toothpaste, a toothbrush, a small bar of soap, shampoo, a pillow, and a sheet. “That’s what you had to defend yourself with, every day,” a recent resident of the Hall told me. The men were led up to cavernous rooms—they looked like old factory floors, but with new windows and fresh coats of paint—where cots had been laid out from wall to wall. Young men from all over the world were sleeping inches from one another. Many had never heard of Brooklyn before. “It was like a prison,” the recent resident said.
There was no privacy in the Hall, and there were no places to congregate indoors. The men changed in front of one another. The overhead lights were fluorescent, bright, and controlled by staff. There were a few toilets on each floor, but no showers. The city had installed four shower trailers outside containing twenty-four showerheads in total, but only cold water came out of them. “I’m numb to a lot of this shit, but that is wild disregard for usual shelter operations,” a veteran inspector of city shelters told me. New York City’s right-to-shelter laws stipulate that the ratio of residents to showers in a facility must be no greater than ten to one. In the Hall, it was for a time more than thirty to one. (Emergency shelters of the kind set up to house migrants are governed by looser rules than the city’s traditional homeless shelters.) The waits for toilets were so long that men defecated in the showers. Signs were posted in Spanish, French, simplified Chinese, Russian, and Arabic asking them not to do this.
The migrants were offered three meals a day, but the rations were meagre. Many of the residents I spoke with complained of gastrointestinal problems. “Breakfast is an orange and some kind of poundcake,” another recent resident, a Venezuelan, recalled. “Lunch is a lettuce-and-tomato sandwich. Dinner is more poundcake.” (A spokesperson for City Hall said that residents of the Hall were offered multiple food options at each meal, including poundcake.)
There were few electrical outlets available, so, to charge their phones overnight, residents had to leave them plugged in far away from their cots. There were thefts, and rumors got started, stoking interracial conflicts. “The Haitians take the phones,” the Venezuelan told me. They all despised the jittery guards, who spoke mostly English. The Venezuelan showed me a video of guards escorting out a man who’d brought outside food into a dormitory room. (A spokesperson for City Hall said outside food was allowed at the facility.) Many of the residents hoped to receive asylum, or to find a way to stay in the U.S. legally—and all wanted to get out of the Hall—but the facility, as a respite center, did not offer help with immigration cases, or with applying for work permits. Mostly, the men were left to fend for themselves.
A few days after the respite center opened, a fight broke out inside one of the Hall’s dormitory rooms. As one migrant told Gothamist, “I was at my cot and then everyone started shoving each other, and then the security guards started to shove us, trying to put all the Venezuelans in a corner.” Afterward, the staff kicked out several Venezuelan men who’d been involved in the fight. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a six-lane highway built by Robert Moses, runs along the south side of the Hall’s property, and the evicted men marched down the block, pitched a handful of tents under the overpass, and started sleeping there.
Even in the best circumstances, a work permit can take six months or more for a migrant to obtain. To make some money in the meantime—and to eat anything apart from what the shelter offered—residents of the Hall pursued several off-the-books occupations. Some walked the streets of nearby neighborhoods, such as Williamsburg, Dumbo, and Clinton Hill, where town houses and condos regularly sell for millions of dollars, collecting bottles and cans to redeem. Some hawked high-top sneakers and loose cigarettes to other residents. Others offered their services as barbers. But the most money, and the most risk, was in delivery work.
To do deliveries, a migrant needed three things, all of which cost money. The first was a phone, which many residents of the Hall had come to America with. The second was a means of fast transportation, such as a bike, or, better yet, a moped. (Some residents borrowed money, or pooled it, to buy mopeds.) The third was a fake account on one of the delivery apps, such as Uber Eats or DoorDash. Such accounts allowed migrants to avoid working under their real names, thus not jeopardizing their asylum cases. I spoke with several migrants who said they had purchased their fake accounts from what sounded like the same man. Some people said he was a gringo who spoke Spanish, and who operated a restaurant near the Hall. Others said he was an immigrant, like them. It was hard to tell. The fake accounts could cost a hundred to two hundred dollars a week, paid in cash up front, and they expired after a week, or two, or four, depending on how much money was put down. (A spokesperson for DoorDash said that sharing or selling accounts is a violation of company policy.)
At the Hall, residents told one another they could expect to make seventy-five dollars a day doing deliveries, but that expectation was often frustrated. If a phone was stolen, or a bike broke down, a resident might not make back what he paid out to rent the account, forcing him to start from square one. Occasionally, at the end of a night that an account was expiring, a migrant would take an order from a restaurant and simply not deliver it, keeping it for himself, or splitting it with his friends.
Eventually, the sidewalks outside the shelter were crowded with vehicles that the residents used for delivery work. On Labor Day, a fight broke out between Latin American and African residents at the Hall—reportedly over a bike. As the conflict was subsiding, a former N.Y.P.D. officer working as a fireguard took out a handgun and waved it wildly at residents and staff. (Video of the incident was later put online.) The police were called, and the ex-cop told them that a resident had swung a construction cone at him. The resident was arrested and charged with assault, menacing, disorderly conduct, harassment, and inciting a riot. “Why are they taking me away if he was the one who was going to shoot me?” the resident later said, according to The City, a local-news Web site. (The guard was later fired. Mulligan Security, who employed him, is still under contract with the city government.)
That Saturday, a moped was stolen outside the Hall. A group of Venezuelan residents got together to perform an all-night watch over their mopeds. Just before 3 A.M., a Lexus S.U.V. pulled up, and a man got out, shouting. The Venezuelan residents shouted back. The man retreated to his S.U.V., put his foot on the gas, and hit two of the migrants.
A week and a half later, I went to the Hall. Walking under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass, I noticed a group of young men and some mopeds huddled together—and a pair of crutches. One man was lying back on a mattress next to a large concrete piling. He was in his late twenties, and slight, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a tattoo of a diamond on his left cheek. A cast was on his left foot, and his purple and mangled toes poked out the top of it. The traffic overhead shook the ground beneath us. “I’m sleeping here now,” he said.
The man’s name was Yoandry Jesus Lozano Bracho. After being run over by the driver of the Lexus, he’d been taken to a hospital in Park Slope with a broken foot. (The other migrant who had been hit, Jhonaker Gil, suffered injuries to his arm and back.) Lozano Bracho said he was then transferred to a shelter in Queens, where there were doctors on-site. But everyone he knew in New York City was back in Brooklyn, as were two mopeds he had borrowed money to acquire. He didn’t work as a deliveryman himself—he rented the mopeds out to others. “I took out one loan to pay the other,” he explained. He’d left Queens on his crutches, got on a bus, transferred to the subway, asking people for directions as he went, and made it back to the Hall. But he wasn’t allowed back in. So he went down the block and lay down under the highway overpass. Some friends soon joined him, and they formed a little community outside. In addition to the mattress, which they shared at night, they had an armchair, some milk crates, blankets, and several mopeds. “They bring me things,” Lozano Bracho said, of his peers under the overpass. “That’s how I eat.” Just in a few minutes together, I saw other men bring Lozano Bracho five dollars, ask Lozano Bracho for five dollars, and quietly discuss matters with him out of my earshot. He accepts in-kind trades. One man who owes him money drives him on a moped three times a day to a public park, Lozano Bracho said, where he uses the bathroom.
After the accident, Lozano Bracho had been forced to sell his first two mopeds, but he’d since acquired a third, the income on which, he said, was just enough to cover his debt payments. To make money, he sold loose cigarettes and joints, which netted about fifty dollars a day. “But each meal in this city is ten or twelve dollars,” he said. Lozano Bracho showed me his foot, and how he unwrapped and rewrapped a bandage that kept a plaster brace in place. When I asked him how long he intended to live under the overpass, he replied, “As long as necessary.” He stared angrily at his foot. “How long will it take me to recover?” he said. He had a partner and two daughters in Venezuela. Their initials were tattooed on his right hand. “What can I send them now?” he said.
One of Lozano Bracho’s friends stopped to listen as we were talking, a baby-faced guy who declined to tell me his name. He’d just come back from doing deliveries. I asked him about the arrangement with the broker of the fake accounts: Did he feel like the price to rent the account was fair, or did he feel exploited by the broker? He looked at me, pityingly. “Brother, welcome to reality,” he said. “There’s nothing else to say. Whether it’s here, or Venezuela, or Argentina.” Just then, other residents of the encampment suddenly started urging everyone, including Lozano Bracho, to stand up. “It’s time, muchachos!” one yelled. Several brooms appeared. Together, the men swept the concrete. One of the residents told me they did this several times a day. Even under a highway, they tried to keep clean.
Lozano Bracho said he didn’t know the man in the Lexus who had run him over. Initial reports in the press had characterized the incident as having been motivated by racism, or anti-migrant bias. The man accused of running over Lozano Bracho is named Hamzeh Alwawi. He is a Jordanian immigrant who owns a fast-food restaurant called BurgerIM, six blocks from the Hall, in Clinton Hill. BurgerIM was an upstart burger franchise that floundered just before the start of the pandemic; its corporate ownership has since been accused of luring immigrant franchisees into a pyramid scheme. Alwawi now operates independently, but has kept the branding. He didn’t deny hitting migrants with his car, but he denied any bias. “I am Arabic, I am Muslim, and I am Black,” he said. “If you want to do racism, you have to do it on me.”
Alwawi said that, for weeks leading up to that night, he’d had problems with deliverymen who were working with fake delivery-app accounts. He knew the accounts were fake because the I.D. photographs on the restaurant’s app interface didn’t match the faces of the workers coming to pick up the orders. But, with food hot and customers waiting, he and his staff had kept handing over orders anyway. BurgerIM is open until midnight on week nights, and 2 A.M. on Fridays and Saturdays, making it one of the last places to close in the neighborhood. Increasingly, at the end of the night, delivery workers were stealing orders—picking them up, but not confirming that they’d done so on the app, and then disappearing into the city. When this happened, the food had to be remade, and the customers got upset. Alwawi had called the police, but to little effect. “This area was never like this,” he said.
The night he ran over Lozano Bracho, two large orders had come in at around 2 A.M. Fifteen minutes later, a deliveryman in a white baseball cap came in to pick up the food. The account he was working under said his name was Karla, and the I.D. photograph was of a woman. The man left the restaurant with the food in his hand, but didn’t confirm the orders. Alwawi was furious. He left an employee to remake the food and he went out to his car, the Lexus S.U.V., and set off in search of the delivery worker. “I said in my mind, ‘I don’t want this guy to enjoy this meal,’ ” Alwawi said. “I’m going to go snatch the bag from his hand and throw it.” He drove up and down the streets of Clinton Hill, past town houses, prewar apartment buildings, housing projects, and fancy wine shops that had shuttered for the night. After a few turns, Alwawi found himself approaching the Hall—a facility he said he had no idea had been there, mere blocks from him, all summer.
Outside the shelter, Alwawi said he saw the young man in the white hat standing in a crowd. Alwawi said he got out of his car merely to “talk,” and then found himself outnumbered. A group of men began pushing and hitting him, Alwawi said. Then, he said, he got back in his car and drove off. I asked if that’s when he hit the two men with his car. “I don’t know,” Alwawi said. He’d returned to his restaurant, and hid inside with his employee, as a group of men on mopeds assembled outside. He said they began to bang on the exterior of his car with the thick metal chains that they used to lock up their mopeds. Alwawi, who had called the police on his way back to the restaurant, was relieved when the police arrived a few minutes later—and then stunned when he was the one arrested. (When I relayed Alwawi’s version of events to Lozano Bracho, he exploded, saying, “Those are damned lies.”)
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s office has charged Alwawi with attempted murder, but he was confident that he would eventually be cleared. “Don’t think I’m talking like this because I don’t like them,” he said, of the migrants at the Hall. “But the place where you put them is not correct.”
Spokespeople for both the city government and RXR didn’t dispute that the conditions at the Hall had been grim. They reiterated that it was a “respite center,” with the barest accommodations, intended for the shortest stays. Migrants are often unaware of the different categories of emergency shelters, and which they have been assigned to, or why. Many of the young men assigned to the Hall lived there all summer, and didn’t anticipate being relocated.
Since this summer, another city contractor, DocGo, has faced criticism and formal inquiries for the conditions at some of its migrant shelters upstate. Like MedRite, DocGo had secured a large city contract to provide services at migrant shelters, after previously operating COVID-19 testing and vaccine sites. Mayor Adams has pushed back on criticism of these migrant-crisis contractors, arguing that no one else is available to do the work needed to house all the people who have arrived in the city. “We take any reported incidents in or around our sites seriously,” Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for Adams, said in a statement. “But it’s important to address the reality without sugarcoating it: New York City has been shouldering a national humanitarian crisis for over a year, almost entirely on its own. In that time, Mayor Adams has repeatedly warned of the serious issues that could arise, and we are now precisely watching that play out.” According to a report in The City, MedRite staffs about twenty of the more than two hundred emergency shelters opened by the city government since last year, while Arrow Security provides services in about a dozen. Residents of several other facilities operated by the two companies have complained of poor conditions, and conflict with guards. Mamelak declined to disclose exactly how many facilities the two companies operate in, or to answer many specific questions about the Hall, including its operating costs.
Spokespeople for both City Hall and RXR told me that the respite center at the Hall was emptied in early October. Last month, renovations were completed in several other buildings on the property, which will serve as a humanitarian emergency-response and relief center, or HERRC, where additional resources like in-building showers and indoor congregate space will be available. The estimated total capacity of the HERRC at the Hall is thirty-four hundred people—more than four times the number of people who were housed at the respite center—and nineteen hundred cots have already been installed. Mamelak sent me photographs of the showers, and of rooms in the Hall with cots spaced feet apart, instead of inches.
On the last day of September, I paid another visit to Lozano Bracho. The previous day, a historic amount of rain had fallen in New York City. The overpass was big enough to keep most of the water away from him and his friends, Lozano Bracho said, but people—including police officers—had come by during the day and taken the mattress and other belongings. They’d offered Lozano Bracho a spot in a shelter in the Bronx. “I said, ‘No, thanks, I’m good here,’ ” Lozano Bracho told me. Like other Venezuelans who’d lived in the Hall, Lozano Bracho referred to shelters as chetes. “In the chete, there’s a problem every day,” he said.
For years, homeless New Yorkers and their advocates have warned that not all shelters are created equal. Well-run shelters that offer services on-site can provide people in crisis with some kind of footing. But large congregate shelters, with little privacy and few services, breed problems of their own. Many street homeless people in New York City have had prior bad experiences in large shelters. “You can’t put that many guys in a space like that and expect a different outcome,” Shams DaBaron, a formerly homeless man who has become a leading homeless and housing advocate in New York City, said, of the Hall. He added that the conditions I described to him weren’t so different from what the rest of New York City’s homeless population has been enduring for decades—without prompting the sense of emergency that the migrant crisis has generated. “We’ve never had electrical outlets,” he said. “We never eat the same food you eat.”
In early October, lawyers representing the Adams administration asked a judge to temporarily suspend the city’s right-to-shelter laws, arguing that, when the rules were written, no one could have anticipated the migrant crisis. Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, said that, if the city houses fewer people, it’ll simply have more people sleeping on the streets. “The city should be helping people move on so that they don’t have to stay in a place like that for very long,” he said, of the Hall. (Goldfein told me that Legal Aid went on a tour of the Hall after it opened, and that he had witnessed staff responding to a fight at the facility during his short time inside.) “The federal government should be helping them get work authorization,” he said. “The state should be helping them relocate. The city should be doing real case management so that people can connect with whatever it is that they need to get some real legitimate employment.”
Brad Lander, New York City’s comptroller, told me that conditions at emergency shelters across the city vary widely, and that the city should do more to create uniform standards, and establish proper oversight. “None of that exists in either the HERRC system or especially the respite shelter system,” he said. His office is currently auditing DocGo, which has a four-hundred-and-thirty-two-million-dollar contract with the city. Murad Awawdeh, the executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, said that the city has created “a separate but unequal shelter system” for individuals who have recently arrived in New York. “I am hopeful that the court will uphold the right to shelter, because, if the court doesn’t, what we will end up seeing is L.A. Skid Rows happening across the city,” he continued. “And, as it is getting colder, the worst thing we can have is folks feeling like their only option is sleeping in the streets.”
The day after the rainstorm, the numbers below the overpass had swelled. When I arrived, two men were screaming at each other and had to be restrained by others. Under the highway, there were all kinds of confusion and frustration about the closing of the respite center, and about where the residents were supposed to go now. Many were tempted to just fend for themselves on the street, to avoid having to start over in an unfamiliar corner of the city. “We’re starving,” a Venezuelan man who said his name was Carlos David told me. David said it was his twenty-eighth birthday. He was holding a cup full of a bright-red liquid, and he was slurring his words. He showed me his forearm, which was covered in a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty holding an assault rifle, which he said he got when he was fifteen years old. “I never thought I’d come to New York,” he said.
Lozano Bracho and the other Venezuelans who had arrived before the end of July were newly eligible for Temporary Protected Status and legal residency in the U.S., thanks to a declaration from President Joe Biden’s Administration. Recently, the Administration also announced that Venezuela had agreed to begin coöperating with the U.S. on deportations for the first time in years, as part of a series of hard-line immigration policies that the Web site Axios deemed “Trumpish.” Under the overpass, the young men felt distant from the public push and pull over the migrant crisis shelter space, legal rights, party politics, the future of commercial real estate in New York City, change agents, and creatives. The night he was run over, Lozano Bracho lost his phone, and access to a federal app called CBP One, which provides migrants with information about work-permit eligibility.
“The only thing I knew about Brooklyn was an old basketball jersey I had,” Lozano Bracho told me. It had taken him nine months to get from Maracaibo, the city where he is from, to the Texas border. He’d run out of money and run into trouble on the way. In Texas, he spent weeks in a detention facility before being offered a free bus ride to New York. He had a cousin in Queens who had offered to put him up if he made it to the city—but his cousin had ghosted him when he arrived. So he’d turned to the shelters. He felt that what had happened at the Hall had marked him in an indelible way. He imagined how he’d be received if he went back to the Roosevelt Hotel with the cast on his foot. “They might think I’d done something wrong, and someone hit me, and that’s why I’m like this,” he said. “They won’t know. They’ll see me differently.” Below the overpass, at least he knew the faces he saw every day, and they knew him. ♦
