Continuing to house tens of thousands of migrants in city shelters — with no end in sight — is “not sustainable,” an official in Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said Tuesday.
“The 64,000 cannot be our baseline,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom told a reporter during a City Hall briefing. “That’s not where we want to be.”
The admission came after The Post on Monday reported that the number of migrants in city-funded shelters has remained stagnant at roughly 65,000 for the last few months.
As of last Tuesday, there were about 65,300 migrants housed in the shelters, a number that plateaued in March, according to figures from City Hall.
It followed two months of steady declines in the shelter population that coincided with a major dip in the number of migrants arriving in the Big Apple each week.
The migrant shelter population hit a high of about 69,500 in January, when about 4,000 migrants were coming to the city a week. Around 1,100 have been arriving weekly more recently.
Just last week, some 900 migrants got to the city — the first time that figure was below 1,000 since October 2022, the administration said.
The Adams administration has held up its controversial time limits on shelter stays as a main driver in reducing the burden on the city’s overwhelmed shelter system
Williams-Isom — during the mayor’s weekly off-topic press conference — conceded that the 60-day limits haven’t proven to be as effective for families, who make up the majority of migrants being housed in city shelters.
“There’s no magic bullet here, but in a lot of places where people have a large majority of families with children, the way that they were able to get them out of shelter wasn’t necessarily through time limits, but it was through resettling people and working with other jurisdictions to make sure that people get settled,” she said, citing findings from an international conference on the issue she attended in Paris recently.
“That’s what we’re going to have to focus on,” Williams-Isom continued, “64,000 cannot be our baseline. That is not sustainable. We have to figure out what tools and continue to be innovative in order to move people out of shelter.”
Adams’ Chief of Staff Camille Joseph Varlack added: “I would add to that where we have seen resettlement of course be extremely successful is where folks have the work authorization so we will continue to advocate for that as well.”
Administration officials said last month that only about 2,000 migrants have been connected with a job as part of an ongoing push to help find work for asylum seekers.