New York’s immigrant crisis continues to grind on. Over 13,000 “asylum-seekers” from the border have arrived since May, with close to 10,000 now housed in the local homeless shelter system. The Department of Homeless Services has seen its shelter census rise 25% over the past four months.
Some, but not most, of the immigrants have come via buses chartered by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The federal government, charities, and one border city, El Paso, account for the rest. New York Mayor Eric Adams has accused Abbott of rank political gamesmanship while also making clear that his city welcomes all immigrants. “Better coordination” is what Adams wants, officially, from Abbott, and he and other local Democrats have emphasized process-oriented reforms to clear immigrants’ access to housing benefits and employment.
But the problem is not process — it’s capacity. New York’s shelter system is not set up to function as a refugee camp. The Department of Homeless Services can’t serve, equally well, its traditional clientele and an ever-rising stream of illegal immigrants from Central and South America.
“Being a city of immigrants is what makes us strong and resilient,” period, has been an article of faith among New York Democrats for years. Not all homeless New Yorkers share this faith, according to the New York Post’s coverage of the crisis.
In mid-July, one 56-year-old shelter client told a reporter, “If we can’t take care of the homeless here, how can we take immigrants? … They get all the resources in the world, but the ones who are here and homeless seem like they are forgotten about.” Another client, age 70 and a veteran, asserted, “You gotta take care of the home first. This is our home first. I feel for the migrants, but you gotta take care of the home first.”
In August, a 55-year-old Navy veteran shelter client gave this quote to a New York Post reporter: “We’ve all been here waiting, going through this process, and let me tell you: They’re getting everything real quick. … They got more in four or five days than I got in 29! They’re brushing us aside.” In September, a resident of the Bellevue Men’s Shelter said, “We don’t want them here because, to be honest with you, to me they’re getting treated better than we do, and this is supposed to be ours.”
Homeless New Yorkers are diverse: single mothers with two-three children, schizophrenics just in off the street, unemployed ex-offenders, runaway teenagers, and so on. New York operates a diverse array of shelters that try to match clients with a program that best suits their needs. The goal is to go beyond just providing a place to sleep and address underlying problems, such as lack of education, struggles with sobriety, and mental instability. A shelter can’t operate in such a programmatic fashion when it’s forced to accommodate a growing number of non-English speakers from the border without legal status and whose needs bear little resemblance to those of native homeless clients.
The Department of Homeless Services, like any other arm of the welfare state that deals with troubled populations, struggles to reconcile quantity and quality. It’s hard for a system like that to serve anyone well when it’s forced to serve everyone. New York shelters must serve everyone due to the city’s unique right to shelter law, which guarantees temporary housing to anyone unable to secure it on his or her own.
The right to shelter dates back to a consent decree signed by Mayor Ed Koch 40 years ago. Koch settled a lawsuit brought by legal advocates, who have remained the dominant influence in homelessness policy in New York across subsequent decades. The advocacy crowd has always denied that granting a right to shelter incentivizes homelessness, insisting that no one ever chooses to be homeless. That argument has become untenable, though, as press reports attest that a main reason why many immigrants want to head to New York is that they’ve heard that everyone’s entitled to free shelter there.
Immigration proponents often stress the general connection between growth and the free movement of peoples while also allowing tension, at the margins, between poor and uneducated new arrivals and poor and uneducated natives. If there ever were a population that qualified as “marginal,” it’s the homeless of New York.
A rising shelter census makes it hard to serve the most difficult cases. The average stay in a shelter, for a family or single adult, is over 500 days. That figure reflects a hard core of complex, long-stay clients whose shelter exits require an expensive intervention such as permanently subsidized housing. Traditionally, housing benefits have been reserved for homeless New Yorkers with legal status, but local liberals are pushing to allow the city to offer some forms of rental assistance to all, “regardless of immigration status.”
Expanding the number of people who qualify for affordable housing does not automatically expand the amount of affordable housing. This is one of the classic pathologies of liberal policymaking: taking on new commitments before making good on existing commitments. Cheap apartments remain the scarcest of commodities in New York, even after decades of strenuous government efforts to increase that stock. Giving border migrants access to affordable housing will simply set them in competition with already homeless New Yorkers for the city’s extremely limited supply of low-rent units.
A rising shelter census also makes it hard to serve the more functional cases. Some homeless New Yorkers have a shot at economic independence and may not necessarily need the government to provide them with housing for the rest of their lives. As of the late 2010s, about a third of family units in the shelter had an adult who was somehow employed, and that figure for single adults was about 15%. The current labor shortage provides an opportunity to boost employment rates among homeless adults who are capable of working. Unfortunately, getting the able-bodied homeless into work has not been much of a priority recently for New York politicians. New York politicians have, though, invoked the labor shortage in their urgent call to change federal policy to ease immigrants’ access to employment.
The effects of the migrant-driven shelter surge may be felt outside of homeless services programs. Adams has cited rising shelter costs for the immigrants — some have estimated it could run in the hundreds of millions — as part of a recent justification for the need for cuts in other city agencies. If crowding makes shelter conditions worse, as some coverage suggests is happening, then that will make it harder to coax the unsheltered population out of the subways. The Adams administration has framed improving subway conditions as essential to getting white-collar workers back into the office. Thus, the migrant shelter surge could complicate New York’s post-COVID-19 recovery.
In left-wing histories of New York, the Giuliani and Bloomberg eras benefited the better off at the expense of the vulnerable. But what happens when liberal policies benefit one vulnerable population at the expense of another? New York’s homeless services system is about to find out.
Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of the recently published book Homelessness in America.
