City officials have rejiggered the way that adult migrants reapplying for another 30-day shelter stint are counted, in an attempt to reduce the number sleeping outside a “reticketing site” in the East Village, advocates say.
The change comes following uproar earlier this week, as hundreds of people waited for hours outside the 7th Street site in the cold, with some men camping outside the facility for nights on end aiming to improve their chances of securing a cot — at least one needed to be hospitalized.
According to the new system, explained by Josh Goldfein, an attorney with The Legal Aid Society which represents the Coalition for the Homeless, people who apply for another 30-days in shelter are now being put on one master list that carries over for multiple days. If a person’s number is called while they’re not there to respond, they should still maintain their place at the front of the line, he said.
Previously, migrants waiting for shelter explained to THE CITY that the line started fresh each morning.
City officials didn’t return a request for comment on the change.
“From what we saw so far, it did seem to immediately, dramatically reduce the number of people that were waiting there overnight,” Goldfein said.
Despite the change, which went into effect midweek, around a dozen men were still camped outside the East 7th Street site Thursday night.
“There are some number of people who believe that that was the best course for them,” Goldfein added.
And, advocates pointed out, while most men may no longer be exposed to the elements, hundreds more are still spending days bouncing between waiting rooms, going days without rest while they wait for another shelter cot.
In a statement from earlier in the week, Kayla Mamelak, a spokesperson for City Hall, said the city is doing its best to provide for more than 121,300 people living in city shelters, including over 66,400 migrants.
“Simply put, we’re out of good options,” she said. “As the temperature starts to drop, we will continue to do our best to keep the line indoors, and provide an indoor waiting room for migrants when the center is closed. But let’s be clear: Our administration is the last place where blame should be laid. We have led in managing this national humanitarian crisis almost entirely alone for more than a year now.”
Gone in 30 Days
In September, the Adams administration began limiting adult migrants’ stays in shelters to just 30 days before they must leave and reapply, in an effort to curb growing need for beds. By late October, the city opened the East 7th Street reticketing site inside St. Brigid’s, a former Catholic school, as a place to direct all migrants whose 30-days had expired.
The reticketing site’s stated purpose was to provide migrants free tickets to any state or country of their choosing, though only about 10 percent of those who passed through there in the past month took the city up on the offer, THE CITY reported. The rest were looking for another 30-days in shelters and a cot, which could sometimes take days to secure.
When the East 7th Street location closes each night at 7 p.m. anyone who didn’t get a cot assignment is directed to a second facility in Claremont in The Bronx, where they can spend the night sleeping on the ground.
For most of the past month migrants have been able to secure a new cot within a day or two. But over the Thanksgiving weekend the line outside East 7th Street exploded, a chaotic situation that unfolded due to a combination of holiday understaffing at the site, as well as an unexpected increase in new adult migrants arriving in New York for the first time.
Men began sleeping outside the East Village location, while others lined up as early as 3 a.m.
They had no access to bathrooms while they waited. Some described peeing between cars in front of the building so as not to stray far from the line. While the city offered snacks of crackers and tuna to those indoors, people waiting outside weren’t given any food, days without a meal.
“It wasn’t easy to be there, asking for a bed, a place to stay and going to work at the same time. It was really hard. It took me six days there in order to get out, because I couldn’t stop going to work,” said Gerardo Mendoza in Spanish, who described getting placed back at the end of the line every time he showed up at the 7th Street site after work.
Mendoza started trying to get a new shelter placement on the Friday after Thanksgiving and spent two nights commuting between a waiting room in The Bronx, where he slept on the floor, and the East Village. He wasn’t assigned a cot until the early hours of Thursday morning the next week, after he’d spent a night outside St. Brigid’s on the sidewalk.
Every time he went to work, he lost his spot in line. Mendoza welcomed the city’s change in line counting. “It’s much better for people who have jobs,” he said.
“You don’t have to go every single day and start from zero. You know you’re registered and you just have to wait until your number is called,” he said.
Others said they’d prioritized getting a cot and paid the price. Jesus Santander told THE CITY he had recently found a job painting houses but his boss fired him after missing work to wait for a shelter bed. In the five days it took him to secure another shelter cot, he also missed days of English classes he was taking, as well as an appointment he’d scheduled weeks in advance to sign up for a NYC ID, a crucial form of documentation for new arrivals.
“This city lives off of so many millions of migrants who arrive searching for a better future. It depends a lot on the hard work of migrants,” he said in Spanish, saying he’d have to start searching for work again to have enough money to move out of the shelter. “It takes time to save up to pay rent.”
‘The Craziest Day’
While most migrants should no longer need to be exposed to the elements while they wait, the change in line has done little to alleviate a backlog of more than 400 people waiting for cots at the St. Brigid site, an administration source said.
Mammad Mahmoodi, co-founder of EV Loves NYC, a volunteer-run food distribution nonprofit which has been bringing hot meals to people waiting for cots, said Friday was the busiest he’d seen the facility.
He said an employee at the site had begged his group to return with hot food, since the city was only providing limited snacks to people who’d been waiting for days for a bed. On Friday, the group fed several hundred people outside St. Brigid’s Mahmoodi said, but workers on site blocked them from supplying hot meals to the hundreds more inside, despite their pleas for food.
“They were on the windows begging us to feed them and because they were hungry,” he said.
Instead Mahmoodi said, he had to jump up and down, sliding the meals inside through a crack in an open window. When workers saw him, they shut the window and locked it.
“Today, today was the craziest day for sure,” he said.