NYC issues 1,500 migrant families 60-day notices to leave shelter or reapply

New York City officials have told about 1,500 migrant families with children living in homeless shelters that they have 60 days to leave or reapply for emergency housing — ramping up enforcement of a new policy City Hall says is meant to alleviate a crowded system.

The Adams administration announced the new rules last month to limit shelter stays for the 65,400 migrants in the city’s care. The restrictions apply to about 4,300 migrant families, roughly 15,000 individuals, who are staying in the city’s shelter system run by NYC Health + Hospitals, not the majority of families with kids staying in facilities run by the Department of Homeless Services.

The city also opened a 2,000-bed tent facility on Sunday at Floyd Bennett Field in southeast Brooklyn, where officials say more than 20 migrant families are currently staying. But local lawmakers said several families who were bused to the isolated site, which is located at a former airport in Jamaica Bay, refused to move in, citing the remote conditions and the site's distance from schools where some of the children are already enrolled.

“People are arriving every day,” City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak said.

As of Monday, all the families at Floyd Bennett Field were new arrivals, Mamelak said. She didn’t immediately address why several news outlets over the weekend reported some of the families taken to Floyd Bennett Field were transferred from other shelters across the city, contradicting the city's statements that the site would be used to house only the newest migrants checking into the Roosevelt Hotel, the intake center for those who have no place to live.

The changing shelter rules come as the city is mediating with social services providers in court over its effort to temporarily suspend its long-standing obligation to guarantee a shelter bed to anyone who asks for one. The so-called right-to-shelter rule has been in place since 1981, but Mayor Eric Adams has said the consent decree is outdated and wasn’t meant to accommodate large groups of migrants.

The city is already limiting shelter stays for migrant adults to 30 days in facilities run by other agencies, such as the Office of Emergency Management and Health + Hospitals system, but will now extend that policy to migrants staying in the city’s traditional shelter system.

Migrant families who have until next month to leave their shelter said they’re worried the rules will affect their children, many of whom have found stability in their schools. Social services providers agreed that forcing families to reapply for housing every 60 days could be destabilizing to children, many of whom have already witnessed trauma.

“Between delays in arranging busing, a shortage of bus drivers, unreasonably long commute times, and other obstacles, parents often feel they have no choice but to uproot their children from schools they love when they move shelters,” Jennifer Pringle of Advocates for Children previously said.