The New York Mayor’s Office has rescued the project to build a mega-immigrant housing center on Randall’s Island, an island located between Harlem, the southern Bronx and northern Queens, Mayor Eric Adams announced today.
The center, for which dates have not been announced, will accommodate adult men, will have a capacity of a thousand beds and will offer “a series of additional services”, supposedly food and legal advice, although it is not specified in the statement issued by the Mayor’s Office .
A similar idea was announced last October and the Mayor’s Office even erected a giant tent, but the low number of interested people led to its closure just three weeks later, without the cost of the failed operation being communicated at the time.
However, the constant flow of immigrants arriving in New York throughout the year, even in the coldest months -now there are already 57,200 people- has made the Mayor reconsider its need, and Adams announced that this time it will be the New York State which will bear the cost of construction, maintenance and staffing.
“As the number of asylum seekers grows by the hundreds every day, straining our system to the breaking point and beyond, it’s an increasingly herculean effort to find enough beds each night,” said Adams, who has been warning for months against that the city no longer has enough resources and has asked the central government for help.
Throughout a year of immigration crisis, New York has enabled 190 “emergency accommodations” -including hotels, gyms or schools, where families have preference- and thirteen large centers intended mainly for single men.
The city of New York is the only one in the United States that has the legal obligation -by a regulation that dates back to the seventies of the last century- to provide housing to any homeless person, whether or not they are a US citizen, but already last month Mayor Adams announced that he was going to start applying a cap of six months of stay to be able to admit newcomers.
It is that status as a “refuge city” that attracts many immigrants, although it has also helped that the governor of Texas, the hardline Republican George Abbott, has chartered hundreds of buses to transport immigrants from the southern border to New York; last week, Abbott bragged about getting rid of 28,000 immigrants this way.
2023-08-07 19:57:00
#City #rescues #idea #megacenter #immigrants #Randalls #Island
