Mayor Adams’ administration is shelling out an average of more than $10 million per day on housing and feeding migrants amid an ongoing surge in asylum seekers from the Southern border analysis.
Zach Iscol, Adams’ emergency management commissioner, said at a City Council hearing Friday that the administration is on average spending $363 per day on room and board for every person in its care. That eye-popping estimate, Iscol said, accounts for all people living in the Department of Homeless Services shelter system as well as the administration’s Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, which only house migrants.
“That’s an average for both systems,” Iscol said at the hearing, which was held by the Council’s Contracts Committee to analyze the administration’s migrant crisis spending patterns.
Iscol said the city currently houses about 30,000 asylum seekers. Based on Iscol’s $363 per person estimate, that means the city is on average spending $10.89 million every day on housing and food for the 30,000 migrants currently in HERRCs and shelters.
“This is not sustainable,” Iscol said of the city’s ballooning migrant crisis tab, which topped $500 million as of mid-February.
The city has largely shouldered the financial burden of the migrant crisis alone since thousands of mostly Latin American asylum seekers started arriving last spring. The federal government has thus far only forked over about $8 million in migrant-related aid to the city, according to Adams’ administration.
Roughly 8,000 of the 30,000 migrants are housed in the Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, commonly known as HERRCs. .The city is currently operating eight HERRCs. Seven of them are running out of hotels, and the eighth one is in a sprawling Brooklyn Cruise Terminal warehouse on the Red Hook waterfront.
The rest are in the shelter system, Iscol said.
According to Iscol, the administration had spent $141 million on the HERRCs alone as of the end of January. First Deputy Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Molly Park, who was also at the hearing, said her agency had spent $313 million as of the same time frame on accommodating migrants.
Adams officials at Friday’s hearing said the city needs a lot more help from the feds and the governor, noting that the administration estimates it could spend as much as $1.4 billion on the migrant crisis this fiscal year alone. Hochul has deployed National Guard troops to help with migrant response logistics, and provided some legal resources for asylum seekers,
Queens Councilwoman Julie Won, a Democrat who chairs the contracts committee, agreed that the city needs more assistance — and took direct aim at Hochul.
“She can’t just be our governor when it’s convenient,” she told Iscol. “I agree with you that our state partners and our federal partners need to step up.”