New York City to open second migrant shelter for asylum seekers in Times Square hotel

Row Hotel will house up to 200 families as city urges support for 18,000 people seeking asylum

As officials prepare to open a tent facility to provide temporary shelter for hundreds of people seeking asylum in the US, New York City will support a second migrant shelter for up to 200 families in a Times Square hotel.

The city’s Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers are intended to ease the burden on an already-strained shelter system, with more than 18,000 people seeking asylum – including hundreds of people bused north by Texas Governor Greg Abbott – seeking shelter in the city since May.

The Row Hotel in Times Square will initially serve 200 families with children, “with the ability to scale to serve additional families in the coming weeks,” according to an announcement from Mayor Eric Adams.

“This is not an everyday homelessness crisis, but a humanitarian crisis that requires a different approach, and these humanitarian emergency response centers will take on a multitude of looks with the similarities that they will all help triage and provide immediate support to arriving asylum seekers,” he said in a statement on 12 October.

“We will continue to respond with care and compassion as we deal with this humanitarian crisis made by human hands,” the mayor added.

The relief centres serve as a “first touch point” for newly arrived asylum seekers, with legal and medical support, food, and assistance finding more-permanent shelter.

A tent facility that can temporarily house up to 500 people will soon open in a parking lot on Randall’s Island.

Last week, the mayor announced he was relocating an in-progress tent shelter from a parking lot in The Bronx to the island after concerns about flooding at the site.

Mayor Adams also declared a state of emergency to address the influx of newly arrived migrants and urged state and federal agencies to provide immediate support.

On 10 October, the city’s Department of Homeless Services shelter census counted a new single-day record of 62,174 people living within the city’s shelter system, surpassing a previous record of 61,415 from 12 January, 2019.

The average length of stay in city shelters also has risen dramatically, with single adults spending an average of 509 days in shelters, while families with children spend 534 days, and adult families spent 855 days.

That increase is “fueled by rising numbers of people entering the system, by bureaucratic bottlenecks precluding residents from transitioning into permanent and safe affordable housing quickly, and, most notably, by the city’s continued failure to create anywhere near enough affordable housing for the New Yorkers who need it most,” according to Coalition for the Homeless and the Legal Aid Society.

The organisations urged the Adams administration to “take definitive action to move homeless New Yorkers into permanent housing” and expand government-supported housing voucher programmes that have chronically long wait lists.

Civil rights groups and officials also have criticised the Adams’ administration’s plan to temporarily house migrants at the tent facilities, warning that doing so could violate a right-to-shelter mandate.

Newly arrived migrants have outpaced availability of shelter spaces within the city’s sprawling system, according to City Hall. Roughly 40 hotels have been tapped to temporarily house migrants, and the city also is considering a shelter on a docked cruise ship.

The city is considering a “multitude” of other shelter options, according to a statement.

Housing and immigration advocates have urged the city to facilitate more permanent housing options, rather than tent cities, to provide for newly arrived migrants, and have stressed that the city’s failure to bolster its housing assets – not the migrants’ arrival – has led to the current shelter crisis.

The 27-storey Row Hotel, formerly Milford Plaza, is located on 8th Avenue in midtown Manhattan.

Crucially, the hotel is just blocks away from the Port Authority Bus Terminal where most migrants arrive, and where nonprofit groups and others have provided immediate care to newly arrived asylum seekers.

As a shelter facility, the hotel site will “welcome families seeking asylum with a comfortable place to stay, as well as food, medical care, language access, technology, and case management services to reconnect with their family members and settle where they want to be,” according to Ted Long,senior vice president of ambulatory care and population Health with NYC Health + Hospitals, which is operating the centres.

Since April, Governor Abbott has bused people seeking asylum in the US to Democratic cities on the East Coast to provide what he has called “much-needed relief” to border communities and to protest what Republican governors have characterised as President Joe Biden’s “open border” agenda.

Thousands of migrants have been sent to New York, Chicago and Washington DC.

Millions of people have fled Venezuela in the wake of the country’s political and economic collapse, making the dangerous, often months-long trek through Central America and Mexico where migrants risk cartel violence, trafficking and abuse.

Biden administration officials have attributed the influx of people seeking asylum at the US-Mexico border to those collapsing regimes and the subsequent food and medicine shortages and threats of violence and abuse.

Following their surrender to border authorities, people seeking asylum are detained and must pass what is called a “credible threat” screening, after which they will receive a notice to appear before an immigration judge for consideration of those claims.