New York mayor promises no migrant families will sleep on NYC streets as critics blast shelter evictions

With migrant families facing eviction from the temporary homes where they’ve lived since arriving in New York, Mayor Eric Adams promised Monday that they won’t end up sleeping on the streets.

“This is not going to be a city where we’re going to place children and families on the street and have them sleep on the street,” the mayor said during his weekly press briefing at City Hall. “That’s not going to happen.”

But the evictions come amid a flurry of criticism from elected officials and advocates concerned about the city’s ability to find families shelter, disruptions to education and how the new model of shelters as a revolving door will continue to destabilize families trying to start a new life in New York.

At a rally in Foley Square on Monday calling for Adams to reverse his policy, city Comptroller Brad Lander bashed the 60-day policy, calling it “one of the cruelest things the city has done in generations.”

“We have the resources that we need to make sure every kid can stay in their public school for the remainder of this year so they can grow and thrive,” Lander said, questioning the budgetary need for turning out migrant families.

As of the end of last week, 4,800 families with children had been served 60-day notices mandating they leave the city’s care or reapply for shelter, according to the Adams administration. The eviction dates are staggered.

Forty families at the Row, a hotel-turned-emergency shelter in Midtown Manhattan, will see the first evictions as they collect their belongings and move on Tuesday morning, while children are supposed to be in school. Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society’s Homeless Rights Project, estimated the city could see 100 families pushed out each day within the next few weeks.

Advocates, other elected officials and migrants themselves are worried that Adams’ promise could be broken in the days and weeks to come, following the experience of single adult migrants who have been forced to leave their temporary homes.

Despite the city’s legally mandated “right to shelter,” migrants have often had to resort to sleeping outside or on trains since the first shelter stay limits went into place for adults. Others have found some respite at a far-off waiting room in the Bronx and other locations, where people have resorted to sleeping on the floor or metal chairs in crowded rooms until receiving a new shelter assignment.

Under a separate city policy, single adult migrants can only stay in the same shelter bed for 30 consecutive days before they need to reapply for placement. Outside an East Village reticketing site, dozens of single adults have in recent weeks hung layers of plastic over metal barricades on the sidewalk as insulation against frigid nighttime temperatures while waiting for days for a shelter bed after being booted from their previous placements due to the 30-day restriction.

And over the summer, people slept outside the Roosevelt Hotel — where migrant families will go to reapply for shelter starting Tuesday — while waiting for a bed to become available.

The Adams administration’s policy is intended to free up space in the shelter system and prod migrants to move on from the city’s care.

“People thought it was wrong that we did 30-day notice; turned out that it was the right thing to do,” Adams said, pointing to data showing that more than three-fourths of migrants who have received those notices did not reapply to stay in city shelters.

Monday’s protest was the second over the past few weeks in a last-ditch effort to stop the administration from moving forward with the evictions.

“Let’s be perfectly clear: the 60-day rule is one thing and one thing only — harassment,” said Christine Quinn, who heads the shelter and supportive housing nonprofit Win. “This rule is being put in place because the administration has failed to develop or implement a holistic plan to house and support the asylum seekers. There is no leadership coming out of City Hall.”

“In their efforts to reduce the number of folks who need housing, they think ripping children out of their beds will make these families leave and go back to their countries of origin. That will not happen. What will happen is that children and their families will sleep on the floor of offices, they will sleep on the street,” said Quinn.

Families turned out of their shelters have been directed to go to the Roosevelt Hotel. Once there, families with children will be placed on a line that’s separate from the one that newly arrived single adult migrants.

Dr. Ted Long, a top official at the city’s public hospital system who oversees the Roosevelt Hotel migrant intake center, said that caseworkers have held four meetings with each of the families leading up to Tuesday to figure out what they may need and whether they’ll have to reapply for shelter.

Returning families with kids will be prioritized over adults, and Department of Education officials will be on-site Tuesday, he said.

“If your child is in elementary school, you’re the highest priority for us to immediately and quickly give you another placement in Manhattan, preferably close to where your child’s in school,” Long said.

“If your child is in school during the day again we will work with you to pick up your child, and DOE is on-site to make any coordination in terms of new bus routes, or even MetroCards for you and your children to make sure that school is uninterrupted.”

But migrant families pushing up against evictions cast doubt last week on the administration’s rosy assessment, saying they’ve struggled to meet with case workers or may need to take their children out of schools while shuffled around.

“If I have to go to another shelter, she’ll have to miss classes,” Esleither Jose Angulo Manzano, 32, said of his daughter, who’s in first grade. “We have to do paperwork … That’s a full day.”

He knew little about the process of reapplying for shelter and said he’d received scant details from the city: “Nothing at all, really.”