Why New York City might house migrants in Central Park

New York City is considering housing migrants in Manhattan’s iconic Central Park, to deal with the influx of asylum seekers that is overwhelming the city’s homeless shelters.

“Everything is on the table,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said Wednesday at a press conference when asked if migrants might be sheltered in parks. Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park — another of New York City’s most popular parks — are among 3,000 locations the city is considering.

“We think that the system is at a breaking point,” she added.

Adding any form of housing in the city’s most heavily used parks would likely prompt significant public pushback. On Tuesday, the New York Daily News reported that City Hall is considering putting tents for migrants on soccer fields in Randall’s Island Park, prompting objections from park users that children would lose thousands of hours of recreation.

The roots of the crisis

Fleeing poverty, violence and political repression, migrants arriving at the southern border may apply for political asylum and be released until their application is processed. Due to backlogs, as of May, over 1.3 million asylum applications are waiting to be processed. More than 95,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York in the past 15 months, with an additional 300 to 500 arriving each day, and more than 56,000 are still in the city’s care.

Tight on space

New York is the most densely populated major city in the United States, with three times as many residents per square mile as Los Angeles and more than seven times as many as Houston.

With high demand for housing and little new construction in recent decades, the city has among the nation’s highest rents and a vacancy rate below 1% for the most affordable housing.

Asylum seekers are legally barred from seeking employment for at least their first six months in the country, making it especially difficult for them to afford New York rents.

The inevitable result is an influx of migrants into the city’s shelter system, which is already burdened by a high rate of homelessness. The shelter population passed 100,000 in late June, for the first time in history. It now stands at 107,900, roughly half of whom are migrants.

Right to shelter

Under New York law, those who seek shelter cannot be turned away, meaning that the city has to find them a bed.

Buildings from churches to former prisons have been recently repurposed as shelters and filled with cots. But the city is struggling to keep pace with the rapid influx of immigrants, who have been sleeping on cardboard boxes on the sidewalk as they wait for days outside a processing center in midtown Manhattan. As of Wednesday, 200 people were lined up outside the center, according to the New York Post.

The city has also created temporary shelters, including setting up tents in outdoor areas such as a cruise terminal. In response to complaints that the facility was too cold and lacked adequate bathrooms, Mayor Eric Adams himself spent a night on a cot there in February.

Asylum seekers are also being housed in hotels at the city’s expense. Migrants have also been bused to hotels in the Hudson Valley, one to two hours from the city, but two local county governments there won a lawsuit last week blocking more migrants from being sent to them.

Adams recently announced that the city will limit shelter stays to 60 days for single men, drawing criticism from progressives such as New York City Comptroller Brad Lander.

Running out of options

In a city where private outdoor spaces are considered a luxury, the city’s parks — especially its beautifully landscaped parks like Central Park and Prospect Park — are widely treasured and heavily used by the public for a variety of purposes, from picnics and barbecues to concerts and Little League sports. Ceding some of that parkland to temporary housing would represent a real sacrifice for New Yorkers. Central Park is also a major tourist destination.

It has happened before in times of crisis, however. When homelessness spiked during the Great Depression, shanty towns sprang up on parkland, and three such communities were erected on Central Park’s Great Lawn. But they disappeared when the economy recovered. New York City also erected a field hospital in the spring of 2020 to handle patients overflowing from local hospitals during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“It’s been out of the public view until now,” New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Zach Iscol told Politico on Thursday, discussing the migrant housing shortage “And I think people really just had no idea about this hidden humanitarian crisis.”