Gov. Kathy Hochul and New York City Mayor Eric Adams agree: There are plenty of state-controlled properties suitable for housing migrants. They just don’t agree on which ones.
In court-ordered correspondence over the last week, both their offices listed the types of sites they’ve eyed for temporary housing and humanitarian facilities as the city grapples with a continuing wave of migrants arriving in the five boroughs.
Their lists diverge significantly. Adams wants to house people at places like the Javits Center, state college dorms and “vacant upstate summer camps.” Hochul offered up gymnasiums in state parks and New York City colleges, armories in Harlem and Brooklyn and even the Aqueduct Racetrack in Queens — none of which appealed to the mayor, according to the state’s missives.
The dueling letters, which were first obtained by the New York Times, lay bare a behind-the-scenes struggle to reach consensus that had previously been kept from public view. The dispute comes as the Adams administration and migrant advocates call on Hochul to craft a more comprehensive statewide plan for sheltering the new arrivals, many of whom are asylum-seekers.
“This problem needs to be solved, and the state and the city each have obligations and they each have resources that they’re required to use and they should be using,” said Joshua Goldfein, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society, in an interview. “They should be working together to solve the problem. That’s what it’s going to take.”
At the same time, Hochul continues to press the White House on her request to open a temporary shelter at southeast Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, a former federal airfield. The governor says she’s expecting an answer within “the next week or so,” despite the Biden administration publicly keeping quiet.
“I believe that’s going to happen,” she told Spectrum News NY1 on Wednesday. “It’s just a matter of when.”
A behind-the-scenes struggle
New York City is…
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