Reliable shelter: A barber cuts a client’s hair under a pergola in Central Park in New York City. The iconic public space has been commandeered for housing in emergencies before. — AFP
NEW YORK: New York City officials are considering housing migrants in Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park as part of a plan to find new sites for some of the more than 95,000 asylum seekers who have arrived in the past 15 months.
“Everything is on the table,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said Wednesday at a press conference when asked about housing migrants in city parks.
The sites are among 3,000 locations the city is reviewing, she said.
The news site Gothamist reported that the city was considering erecting tents in the two major parks and on Randall’s Island as possible sites for the asylum seekers, citing unidentified people familiar with the discussions.
Williams-Isom declined to comment on how imminent the plan was, and didn’t directly answer a question about who the city was working with on potential plans to house people in city parks.
A memo obtained by CNN earlier this year listed a YMCA in Park Slope, Brooklyn; a recreation centre in Staten Island; the campuses of York College and Medgar Evers College; and the parking lot at Citi Field in Queens as possible shelter sites.
Placing migrants in temporary structures inside either Central Park or Prospect Park would bring high visibility to a crisis that’s dogged mayor Eric Adams’s administration for months.
On Tuesday, scores of people were sleeping and waiting for help on the sidewalks outside the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan.
Adams has repeatedly criticised the Biden administration for failing to provide significant logistical or financial aid to the city to help manage the crisis.
The mayor and members of New York’s congressional delegation met last week with US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas to discuss the issue.
On Wednesday, Williams-Isom denied the city is letting people sleep on the streets as a tactic to force the federal government to come to the city’s aid. No one in the Adams administration “would use any people to do a stunt,” Williams-Isom said.
The city’s shelter system housed 107,900 people as of July 30, a record high that has more than doubled since January 2022, when the total shelter census citywide stood at 45,000 people.
Some 56,600 of the city’s current shelter residents are migrants.
On rare occasions in Central Park’s history, the iconic public space has been commandeered for housing in emergencies.
During the Depression in the 1930s, homeless people set up “Hoovervilles, and during the Covid-19 pandemic a field hospital was erected to manage the overwhelming number of early cases of the disease. — Bloomberg
