The Adams administration will shutter 13 more emergency migrant shelters, including a massive Brooklyn facility where 3,500 migrants currently reside, as the number of asylum seekers traveling to the city continues to recede, Mayor Eric Adams said Friday.
The closures will dismantle shelters in every borough but the Bronx, along with one in Yonkers, by June, and marks an escalation of the mayor’s efforts to streamline the city’s rapidly deployed network of migrant shelters. The new batch of closures comes a month after Adams announced that the city had already begun to wind down 25 shelters dedicated to newly-arrived migrants.
Most notably among the list of closures is a former warehouse turned sprawling migrant shelter on Hall Street in Clinton Hill, which opened in 2023 with no public announcement to the dismay of locals. Emergency shelters at 99 Washington Street in Manhattan, Hotel Nedia in Queens and the Holiday Inn in Staten Island are included in the closures.
“The additional closures we are announcing today, provides yet another example of our continued progress and the success of our humanitarian efforts to care for everyone throughout our system,” Adams said in a statement.
But even as the city works to close dozens of emergency shelters the Adams administration said Friday that it will open a new migrant facility on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx dedicated to single men who are being transferred from the tent-based emergency site on Randall’s Island. Set to open later this winter, the new Bronx center will house up to 2,200 people in a seven-story warehouse building, according to the city. The city’s Housing Recover Operations office will operate the new space.
The 2,000-person migrant shelter at Floyd Bennett Field and the problem-plagued relief center on Randall’s Island are among the other shelter sets set to close in the coming months. All told, the series of closures is set to cut the city’s capacity to shelter migrants by 10,000 beds, according to the Adams administration.
The swell of shelter closures follows a shift in Adams’ rhetoric on how the federal government should treat migrants in the boroughs. Adams has recently questioned whether undocumented immigrants accused of crimes are entitled to due process, and said he is considering using his executive powers to change the city’s sanctuary laws to enable more cooperation with the federal government.
More than 150 hotels that were converted to shelters by the city have closed since the migrant crisis began in 2022. It’s unclear what will become of the former shelters, but at least one may become the site of a new apartment building. Last summer, real estate giant RXR Realty submitted plans with the city to turn the Clinton Hill relief center into a mixed-use residential and retail complex with more than 600 apartments.
