Crowds gathered on Staten Island earlier this week to protest the city’s decision to use a shuttered Catholic school to house hundreds of migrants. It’s the latest migrant shelter location in the five boroughs to elicit protests from local residents.
Staten Island Borough President Vito Fossella attended the protest on Monday. He’s been an outspoken critic of the city’s policy of housing the thousands of people arriving each month.
He spoke with WNYC’s Sean Carlson on “All Things Considered” on Wednesday to share his perspective on the issue.
An interview transcript is available below. It was lightly edited for clarity.
Borough President Fossella, thanks for joining us. Welcome back to WNYC.
Great to be with you. I appreciate you having me on.
So there have been a bunch of protests across the city against some of these shelters, whether it’s a school gym on Coney Island or a psychiatric center in Queens. Why are Staten Island residents and electeds so opposed to this shelter?
So, if I may, I just want to go back and turn the clock back to about this time last year. When folks started arriving in New York City and New York City said, “Come on in. We’re a right-to-shelter city and we’ll put you up and we’ll feed you.” And I think that’s noble. But it’s wrong policy because, what we said last year, it was going to be unsustainable. And how can we expect to put 50,000, 100,000, half-a-million people up in hotels for an indefinite period of time and feed them?
And we said it then, and we repeat it today, because not only was it going to just be sort of places [where] there’s no concern or no opposition, but as people just kept on coming and coming, and they continue to arrive in the city, they’re going to start looking elsewhere.
And that’s what the city is saying. We’re desperate for locations, so they end up in a place called Arrochar, which is a beautiful residential community in what was an old Catholic school now owned by the city of New York, and it’s across the…
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