Migrants are flooding into New York City, exposing the high cost of NYC’s “right to shelter” in an open-borders federal administration.
The NYC mayor recently said that half of booked hotel rooms in NYC are currently being used by migrants, with thousands more arriving every week. Eric Adams recently ordered city agencies to cut budgets because the expenditure is meant to exceed $1B this year. He is talking about housing immigrants in school gyms, while school is still ongoing.
Mayor Adams estimates that migrants cost the city $4.3 billion in 2023 and 2024. About 2% of a budget that was already expected to hit at a $7B deficit in 2026.
While Adams is currently exploring the option to repeal or eliminate NYC’s right to shelter laws, pursuing that outcome there might be even worse. Suddenly 70,000 migrants would be homeless on the streets of New York.
Short of Congress and the President deciding to reverse course on the policies that have led to this migrant surge, there are no good solutions here.
Eric Adams asked for ideas, so I wanted to share that of all the bad solutions on the table, I think that one of the better ones would be to use Airbnb or an equivalent service to house migrants in a distributed manner throughout the five boroughs rather than in hotels in the central business district.
Doing so would have some other positive side effects, which would include:
Economic stimulus: Give these funds directly to people rather than hotels. Free up hotel rooms for tourists which bring money to the city rather than drain money from it.
Save the city money: Currently NYC is paying ~$200/day for a hotel room, even when purchased in bulk. I imagine a lot of people would take $100/day or $36,000/year for their extra bedroom.
Control over placement: If 65,000 migrants is the numator, then you can achieve this by saying only one house in every 3 city blocks can participate in this program.
Willing participants: Anyone renting out their flat or guest room to a migrant, whose payor is the city, is doing so on a willing basis. This seems more fair than telling people that 1,500 migrants are moving into their neighborhood. Given the massive protests against Trump’s immigration policies in NYC, this also gives those politically-inclined people to put their money where their mouth is. Right? Right?
Community Integration: Unlike hotels that often exist in commercial areas, these would be nestled within local neighborhoods. This makes them perfect for enabling migrants to gradually blend into their new environments.
Employment: I assume a lot of migrants work labor or service jobs for cash under the table currently, and I expect that if every 3-4 blocks in Brooklyn, Queens, and Bronx had a newly-arrived migrant that migrant would be able to fund their food with the cash they make finding labor jobs.
Problems with this plan include:
Many of these 65,000 migrants will behave badly and be bad guests for their hosts
The lack of landlord rights in NYC vis-a-vis squatters or problem tenants
Fight that would ensue with the hotel lobby to get this approved.
This isn’t a GREAT idea, but after enough bad decisions have been made, great options are often off the table.
This is much better than housing tens of thousands of migrants together in luxury hotels in Manhattan and then potentially discharging them simultaneously when the city runs out of money or changes right to shelter laws. It’s better than putting migrants in school gyms where kids are trying to learn.
It’s better than busing them to upstate NYC or any other solution I’ve heard.