Mayor Eric Adams’ administration this week chided the state for only moving a fraction of migrant families out of shelter through a $25 million program that kicked off in the spring — and while the city’s numbers were lower than what the state reported, city officials weren’t far off.
“We keep on asking the state to help us with resettlement,” said Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, at a City Hall press briefing this week. “I think they’ve resettled 20 families?”
A spokesperson for the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, or OTDA, which is running the program, said 50 families have signed leases and moved or are about to move. About 150 more are enrolled and receiving case management services.
But the number of leases still represents less than 5% of the 1,250 families the Migrant Relocation Assistance Program, or MRAP, is funded to support.
“We will continue to work with New York City and the participating communities to enroll as many families as possible,” OTDA spokesperson Anthony Farmer said in a statement Wednesday.
The program was approved in the state budget in May and is designed so the state works with nonprofit groups to place families in housing outside of the city, with rent payments covered for up to a year.
As of last month, more than 48,000 migrants traveling as families were in the city’s care, data published by the city comptroller’s office shows. More than 90% of these families included children, and the overall number of migrants in city shelters has continued to balloon since last year.
Williams-Isom’s recent comments and MRAP’s slow progress expose ongoing rifts between the city and state in their handling of the migrant influx, which is bringing hundreds of migrants to the city weekly and driving up the costs of caring for them — already in the billions of dollars.
In a statement Thursday, Avi Small, a spokesperson for Gov. Kathy Hochul, said the state has “repeatedly…
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