The Mamdani administration plans to close New York City’s last remaining emergency migrant shelter by the end of the year, according to a planning document released on Thursday.
The megashelter located at Bruckner Boulevard in the South Bronx opened in February 2025 and houses nearly 2,000 residents.
The site’s closure would finally shut the door on the city’s emergency shelter system for migrants that has accommodated more than 240,000 asylum-seekers, largely under previous Mayor Eric Adams.
But homeless advocates said the more than 250 sites propped up by the city — including at hotels and sprawling tent shelters at Floyd Bennett Field and on Randall’s Island — created a shadow system with less stringent rules and accommodations than traditional city shelters.
As the migrant shelter population has declined in recent years, the city has begun to close migrant-only shelters and transition asylum-seekers to more traditional shelters accommodating all New Yorkers. Starting next year with the closure of the South Bronx site, the city will no longer shelter new arrivals and longtime New Yorkers separately.
Shortly after taking office Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered the city’s Department of Social Services to come up with a plan to phase out its remaining emergency migrant shelter and bring other shelters into compliance with city rules — such as providing kitchens for families with children and limiting shelter to no more than 200 people.
The six-page plan said the last migrant megasite operating outside the traditional shelter system will shutter by December with residents relocated to beds run by the city’s Department of Homeless Services. Other department sites that were quickly erected for migrants but defy local shelter laws will be downsized, relocated or otherwise brought up to code, according to the plan.
The city also plans to open new shelters delayed under the Adams administration and increase the number of people leaving the shelter system and moving into permanent housing.
“Insignificant” meanwhile he’s mayor of the most important city of the American empire
And you don’t think New York fuckin City doesn’t meet that criteria? Mayor of the financial and cultural heart of the country isn’t prestigious enough?
Mayor isn’t a significant political office in the US. Mayors of Beijing and Shanghai sit in the Central Committee and even they get outranked by party secretaries of the Beijing and Shanghai Municipal Committee respectively.
Mayors do not become president. Governors and senators do. The last mayor who became president was Coolidge over a century ago.
And let’s be real, NYC hasn’t been the cultural heart of the US for a century at this point. Tin Pan Alley tunes and Yiddish vaudeville stopped being the forefront of Burgerlander pop culture more than half a century ago.
We’re not talking about China, we’re talking the US and the West and New York City is a political powerhouse in the west, hence the enormous attention paid to the race last year by DC and the entire country
This is such a meaningless pattern to observe, especially after a figure like Trump won twice, there you go there’s the new pattern, media sensations from New York will win the presidency from now on
So we went from “cultural heart” to “one of the major poles.” Good, progress has been made. Why do I have a feeling you don’t value the mayors of those other “major poles” as much as this particular major pole?
It’s almost like it’s a big ass country and despite New York being the cultural heart, there are other major poles like Los Angeles
Why would I care about neoliberal mayors in charge of other major cities? You think I was cheering for Adams just because he was in charge of New York?
It hasn’t been the cultural heart for a century. It lost out when the film industry moved from NYC to Hollywood. That was my point. Since then, it existed as a major pole alongside other cities. At best, you could say it was first among equals until the 2010s, when a combination of videogames being an established artform with a base in the West coast, professional sport viewership moving away from baseball to football and basketball, and social media eroding trust of traditional news media further diminished its cultural status as first among equals. The US doesn’t have a real cultural heart. NYC certainly isn’t the center of Americana and it has never been.
Like, are you really going to use theater as an example of cultural influence? People stopped giving a shit about theater when the first films dropped. Frank Sinatra’s generation already didn’t give a shit about theater.
Hollywood is dying and its cultural impact was always globally diffuse and claiming video games are a West Coast phenomenon is delusional, threading on semantics doesn’t change the fact New York City is the leading metropole in cultural production; again, music, fashion, food, publishing, tourism, art, and yes theater did you forget how many wealthy libs exist in this country? Did you forget the effect bullshit like Hamilton had on liberal consciousness?
The number one city in overall cultural production gets to be called the cultural heart and semantics doesn’t change that, when people think of Americana, New York City looms the largest in their minds
The fact the mayoral election became a national phenomenon that had even dumb southern hicks thinking they could vote in it proves New York is the leading city of the American Empire
What the hell does that even mean? Hollywood films are the number one cultural export of the US. People in China watch trailers of capeshit slop translated into Chinese on Douyin. Absolutely nobody in China gives two shits about Broadway. And this isn’t even getting into Disney and Paramount consolidating hold over media. Are you gonna “uh aktually” me about those media corps just because they aren’t actually located in the particular city of Hollywood but a different southern Californian city that less than a few blocks away?
The videogame industry in the US is all headquartered at the west coast. All the big name AAA studios like Activision-Blizzard and EA have HQs in California. Valve and Microsoft are based in Washington. NYC basically only has Take-Two. Globally, the US videogame industry competes with Japanese and Chinese studios.
None of that shit matters compared with Hollywood films, AAA videogames, Evangelical Christianity, academic papers, traditional news media, social media, and for lack of a better word, NGO-ism. You know, actual US cultural exports that matter. Absolutely nobody in Brazil is consuming the slop that passes for food in the states or watching Wicked. But they sure are watching US films and playing US videogames and being exposed to a particular branch of Protestant Christianity and studying so they can have the chance at getting accepted to a US university.
How does NYC contribute to the pot? Hollywood films and AAA videogames are from the west coast. Evangelical Christianity is from the south. Social media is throughout the country. This leaves traditional news media, which is centered at NYC, and academia/NGOs, which NYC partially contributes through Columbia as an Ivy League.
Maybe if you only talk to New Yorkers lmao. Absolutely nobody in the rest of the country thinks New York represents Americana. The center of Americana is the Midwest. Everybody knows that. Everybody except for New Yorkers apparently.
That’s because traditional news media is centered at NYC. It’s like how Hollywood films always seem to portray LA and California in general in a positive light.
Again we’re not talking about China, videogames are apparently the only thing you consider cultural products which is a bizarre belief on its face (and like film are globally diffuseand not site specific), Evangelicals are culturally marginalized hence their constant crash outs, New York City is the largest site of cultural production in the country, Los Angeles is too expensive and again Hollywood is failing, hence the title of cultural heart goes to New York
Also if you seriously haven’t heard about the continuing enshittication of Hollywood and the hollowing out of its institutions by scandal and AI obsessed executives, then you’ve been living under a rock