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.
Talk about a misleading headline.
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.
Is any of this supposed to be a bad thing?
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.
So even homeless advocates want these locations closed down?
It seems to me like Adam’s privatized, overcrowded sites are being phased out by proper state facilities
You must have missed the memo: Headline about Mamdani can be construed as bad = noone reads the article, so they can continue feeling validated about their oppinions
as ever, headline editors tell an embarrassing portion of the population what to think.
…
“Man in Suit Turns Away Hungry Children”
[context, in the 6th graf after the jump]: his mom died and he had to shorten his hours on sunday to attend the funeral]
Headline: MAMDANI TO CLOSE LAST EMERGENCY MIGRANT SHELTER
Further down: actually only the last established by emergency measure “migrant-only shelter”
Further: transitioning migrants to safer, more regulated shelters. All residents relocated to beds. Sites in breach of standards will be manageably reduced.
I’m ready to slam the guy for being a two-faced lib, but shall we wait until he actually does the bad thing?
I’m actually getting annoyed by these constant posts with weirdly misleading headlines about him, to the point I think we should have a moratorium on discussing this guy.
Why would we have a moratorium? Let’s discuss the misleading headlines head on! Media criticism had always been a part of the site culture.
If we should have a moratorium on something it should be posting in a thread about an article without AT LEAST skimming it first, especially when OP quotes the article in the post.
We should have had a moratorium months ago. People obsessing over an insignificant mayor, which almost all mayors are in the grand scheme of things, is ridiculous. The only mayors who are not insignificant are mayors in countries where being a mayor of particular cities, usually the capitol, is a political stepping stone for more prestigious offices. In the US, being a governor or a senator is a stepping stone for being the president. It’s how Clinton only became senator of NY to pad her resume before failing twice to become president.
People obsessing over an insignificant mayor
“Insignificant” meanwhile he’s mayor of the most important city of the American empire
The only mayors who are not insignificant are mayors in countries where being a mayor of particular cities, usually the capitol, is a political stepping stone for more prestigious offices
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?
“Insignificant” meanwhile he’s mayor of the most important city of the American empire
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.
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?
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
Mayors do not become president. Governors and senators do. The last mayor who became president was Coolidge over a century ago.
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
And let’s be real, NYC hasn’t been the cultural heart of the US for a century at this point.
New York is one the major poles of cultural production in this country; from music, theater, to food culture, and it’s political influence is enormous considering the financial powerhouses that squat downtownNew York is one the major poles of cultural production in this country; from music, theater, to food culture, and it’s political influence is enormous considering the financial powerhouses that squat downtown
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?
So we went from “cultural heart” to “one of the major poles.”
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 do I have a feeling you don’t value the mayors of those other “major poles” as much as this particular major pole?
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’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
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.
I’ll have you know, three time WWE World Champion: Kane happens to be a mayor in a little place called Knox County, Tennessee.
I wouldn’t be so brazen throwing around terms like “insignificant” and “prestigious” and “political.” “Particular” is tough too, just try to avoid anything with more than three syllables, please.
headline sounds bad, content may look neutral on surface, but not concentrating all of Trump’s targets in one camp is probably a good idea.
Gothamist really has it out for the guy aye?
They dont like him at all lmao
I didn’t know this, but they are apparently an affiliate of New York Public Radio. “Public” must be a stretch in this case.
Absolutely right.
When Gothamist was bought out by either NPR or the NY radio affiliate WNYC it became more horrendously reflective of the milquetoast Neoliberal drivel on the radio all day.
Brian Lehrer on WNYC to me is the NeoLib poster boy there. Seems “progressive,” but time and again proves to be a MSDNC brunch time Blue Dog. Guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when he went into the tank against Bernie, perhaps not outwardly but by omission and regurgitating mainstream corporate media talking points but of course in a manner to appear objective.
Haven’t paid too much attention to Gothamis my lately but now will. Because Zohran, as in both the primary and general election, was attacked by both corporate Dem Party media, RW, oligarchs and Zionists and will be the fight ahead too.
I’ve been on the record that either expecting this guy to do revolutionary socialism or being mad at him when he doesn’t do revolutionary socialism are both ridiculous stances to take because he’s a mayor, and the reality of the office that he holds makes it impossible to do anything that Marxists would traditionally consider revolutionary. There are two levels of government that sits over the office (state and federal), it is constrained by budget dynamics (that have been further fucked by mismanagement of prior admins) without any sort of monetary power, and despite NYC being a strong mayor system, the city has arguably the largest, strongest, and most rigid local bureaucracy and bourgeois power structure of any city in the US.
That being said, the articles and commentary about this guy over the past two days, specifically the ones I have seen in leftist online spaces, have been kind of wild. There is this one, and the one I saw yesterday about him restarting homeless encampment sweeps after an initial pause. The additional context of the latter being that social workers will now be doing the sweeps instead of the cops, and they will be on site in the 6 days prior to the sweep coordinating housing either in a shelter or long-term housing. I have criticisms of this, mainly that cities like Houston who have pioneered Housing First policies have a 30 day notice and coordination period, and that they are mostly able to get the homeless directly into housing instead of shelters. The counter to this would be that Houston has the benefit of not having the freezing weather NYC has, which has resulted in at least 20 death of homeless people from exposure since Mamdami took office and paused the sweeps, and that Houston’s program is much older so it has a larger stock of available housing in a city that is not geographically contained the way NYC is.
It has interesting to see the reaction to this news in a certain “tankie” community of a to be unnamed podcast program, because if he had not restarted the sweeps, I suspect it wouldn’t have been long before the criticism from these same people would be that he is letting the homeless freeze to death. There has also been a strange adoption of anarchist talking points in some ML spaces regarding him forcing homeless people off the streets if they want to stay, especially in light of how ML countries like the USSR or China have historically and/or currently deal with urban homelessness. I would think that most MLs would agree that the best course of action would be getting these people into permanent social housing, and generally the first step of that in most Housing First programs is a systematic sweep of encampments by social workers coordinating housing, instead of waiting for these people to lift themselves up by their bootstraps to seek out state help.
It will be interesting to see if he is able to get a Housing First program off the ground in NYC given budget and geographical constraints, but hopefully he pulls it off. However, I expect that it’s going to take a lot of “public-private partnership efforts” (the Houston program and SLC programs rely to a marked degree on religious and charity support), which will likely come with some compromises that aren’t going to be popular with everyone.
i am begging so-called MLs to stop doom-posting about a guy that is not subject to party discipline and is one executive, especially on the basis of active misinformation. it is making my mind ill. this is not useful agitprop and its not honest criticism. if you are upset about a DSA soc dem not organizing militant cadres, i don’t know what to tell you, why would you think he might do that? as i have said before, i also wish that PSL’s vanguard has been more successful, but the angle of this criticism isn’t going to accomplish that. i appreciate your even-handedness mk, i’ve felt like i’m losing it trying to be even-handed myself.
Online ML culture absolutely encourages this vulgar campism and Hexbear isn’t immune. Western leftists expect a population with undeveloped consciousness to all get onboard with their preferred perfect project that doesn’t exist before they will actually do or support anything. Doing the work of educating is actually difficult. This is how you end up with a bunch of BadEmpanadas who are unwilling to do anything except criticize.
Western leftists expect a population with undeveloped consciousness to all get onboard with their preferred perfect project that doesn’t exist before they will actually do or support anything.
i think that’s basically the core of it yeah. criticism is of course an important part of understanding current actors, but the nature of that criticism has to be commensurate with material reality and based on actual facts. everyone wants to do what they think is agitprop (it is online debating) and no one wants to go do organizing and education (does not happen, by definition, in niche online forums for those of us that are already pretty radicalized). educating especially is incredibly difficult and frustrating. for myself, i’m not in organizing right now, but i try to stay aware of that. i know that if i want to complain about someone’s consciousness raising project that i don’t think is radical enough, i need to actually organize my own that demonstrates its utitlity. online campists effectively fail to understand that the context and audience for like What is to be Done? were other organizers in Lenin’s political movement that he was but a part of. i could go on, but i’d just be rehashing your take less eloquently.
but it’s Mamdani and the people mad are people on hexbear who were burned by AOC.it wouldn’t surprise me if I’m the hexbelle who has done the most for AOC, literally as far back as 2017, IRL and posting online, and the idea that you could get burned by one of four progressives in congress, as opposed to the 535 fascists in congress, is pretty funny to me.
It makes sense
We don’t expect anything from fascists, so they cannot disappoint us. We invest no hope in them, so they cannot burn us 
I’m personally very sceptical of Mamdani and there’s plenty of bad press out there. Still I find the hexbear trend of hating on Mamdani incredibly silly.
idk how invested anyone is in making specifically us here not like him, but remember one purpose for spurious criticism is to undermine support from his radlib base and we shouldn’t confuse regular liberals trying to frame things in a way that will piss off people to their left with our genuine critiques from his left.
It’s public radio. They are the most shitlib of shitlibs.
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.
The population decline was going to happen as Trump came into office no matter what. Mamdani might as well shut these down as long as the transfer to other shelters go well (we’ll see i guess).
It’s also a good idea to not leave migrants all in one place for ICE to monitor and terrorize with ease, just a thought.
ah yes, this will be a normal Hexbear thread I’m sure where everyone has definitely read the article in full
Comrades, you have to scroll past it to post. Read it.
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.
How can anyone read this as a bad thing …
I think this approach is kinda sus because, having a bird’s eye view of the uk’s far right, right wingers will use the fact that these facilities share funds/resources with asylum seekers to argue for defunding them altogether.
Right wingers will say and do anything to accomplish their goals. Pretty much pointless to worry about what they’ll do in response to some decision.
EDIT: Spoke too soon
It sounds like “emergency shelter” means “ad hoc shelter designated quickly and without regard for whether it met the standards required for shelters” rather than “shelter for emergency situations”.
Now whether the “find a way to move the current residents of these substandard, overcrowded, ad hoc facilities into the existing system” plan actually happens or not is something one could be cynical about, but it does seem like the system being shut down was some half-assed stopgap response to a crisis and here the mandate is “make the proper system handle this instead”.
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.
Agreed this is terrible.
Seems like it’s a good thing to close these shelters down, or did I misunderstand something in the article?
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.
these sorts of limitations sound good but are in practice quite bad, the alternative is freezing in the street, any warm space is better than arbitrary restrictions meant to ‘improve’ the housing
because they’re all getting housing, right?
___Some are
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.
This is closing a concentration camp basically.
They’re getting rolled into the normal shelter program instead of being segregated into a very adhoc shelter program.
If it’s a joke I’m sorry. If it’s not, please I’m begging you read a little bit before posting.
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.
