New York City wants to accommodate migrants in the city’s iconic parks

New York City officials are considering housing migrants in Manhattan’s Central Park and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park. The city is trying to come up with a new plan to accommodate the more than 95,000 migrants who have arrived in New York in the past 15 months, according to Bloomberg.

“All options are being considered,” Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Ann Williams-Isom said when asked about the possible housing of migrants in New York City’s iconic parks. She added that the parks are one of 3,000 places that can accommodate these people.

According to unofficial information, the city is considering setting up tents for migrants in these two large parks and on Randall Island. Williams-Isom declined to comment on this information and did not give a direct answer to the question of who the city is partnering with on the issue of placing people in city parks.

The federal problem

Housing migrants in temporary facilities inside Central Park or Prospect Park would draw increased attention to the crisis that has plagued the Adams administration for months. On Tuesday, August 1, dozens of people were sleeping and waiting for help on the sidewalks outside the Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

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Adams has repeatedly criticized the Biden administration for not providing enough logistical and financial assistance to the city to manage the crisis. The mayor and members of the US Congress from New York met last week with the head of the US Department of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mallorcas, to discuss the issue.

On Wednesday, August 2, Williams-Isom denied that local officials were allowing people to sleep on the streets to force the federal government to come to the aid of the city. No one in the Adams administration, as Williams-Isom said, “will use people for provocation.”

Limit exhausted

As of July 30, there were 107,900 people in the city’s shelter system, a record number, double the number since January 2022 (45,000 people). About 56,600 of the city’s current shelter residents are migrants from the southern states, not New York’s homeless.

Throughout its existence, Central Park has been used to accommodate people only in case of emergencies. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the homeless erected “Hooverville” there, and during the COVID-19 pandemic, a field hospital was built in the park to house patients with early stages of the disease.