(The Center Square) — Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration wants to shut down New York City’s final emergency migrant shelter by the end of the year, but also plans to build more homeless shelters to reduce the city’s reliance on hotels for temporary housing.
A report by the New York City Department of Social Services, released Thursday, outlines the new mayor’s plans to close the last remaining Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center at Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx and “transition” residents into city’s regular homeless shelters by Dec. 31. There are currently about 1,900 individuals staying in the facility.
“While necessary to meet the overwhelming needs posed by this humanitarian crisis, these sites were opened as temporary solutions and not designed for long-term integration into the city’s homeless shelter system,” the agency said in the report. “The emergency impacts of this humanitarian need have subsided, and the city is fully committed to restoring compliance with shelter regulations and transitioning from emergency operations toward a unified, sustainable system that ensures a high standard of care for all New Yorkers experiencing homelessness.”
A key provision of the plans calls for eliminating the use of hotels for homeless families and focusing on building new, permanent shelters. Currently, New York City has contracts with 112 hotels, accounting for nearly 12,000 shelter units that house about 8,100 families, according to the report.
“Hotels are not designed for long-term family shelter use and do not fully align with regulatory standards,” the report’s authors wrote. “Transitioning families into compliant facilities will improve living conditions and restore legal compliance.”
New York City has been a flashpoint in the national immigration debate with hundreds of thousands of migrants flocking to the city in recent years following a surge of immigration on the U.S.-Mexico border. The city has spent more than $8 billion on housing, food and other costs for migrants over the past two years, drawing scrutiny from the Trump administration.
Under New York’s right-to-shelter law, the city must provide emergency housing to anyone who requests it, regardless of their immigration status. Efforts to repeal the law have been met with lawsuits from immigrant rights groups and advocates for the homeless. In 2024, then Mayor Eric Adams set a 60 day limit on staying in emergency homeless shelters.
To be sure, the city has been winding down the emergency migrant shelters for more than a year amid a drop in new arrivals with immigration along the southern border reaching historic lows under the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal crossings.
The emergency shelter closures included the Asylum Seeker Arrival Center at New York’s iconic Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, which was a target of criticism from Elon Musk and the Trump administration, who criticized the city for housing migrants in “luxury” hotels at the taxpayers’ expense.
At one point, the city was operating more than 50 emergency shelters as it struggled to care for more than 70,000 migrants, refugees, and other homeless individuals.
