The Case for Ending NYC Shelter Limits

“I still communicate with relatives. I tell them not to come,” says Steven, a 25-year-old asylum seeker who arrived in New York last fall.1 Steven is one of the upwards of 175,000 migrants who have arrived in the city since the spring of 2022, seeking work and security only to be confronted by the harsh reality of work permits, money shortages, language barriers, and shelter limits. Like many others, he has been forced to wait in the shelter reassignment line—a line that can be more than two weeks long—at St. Brigid in Alphabet City.2 Since October, thousands of migrants have gathered at the former “school-turned-re-ticketing center” looking to extend their stay in New York City’s shelters. While, in theory, New York guarantees unhoused people, including asylum-seekers, the right to shelter, this right has been complicated by a number of rules and regulations since it was won in Callahan v. Carey (1979), the most recent being the 30-to-60-day shelter limit imposed on asylum-seekers.3 After this period, they must wait to be “reticketed” in order to continue to stay in city-run shelters. Rules like the shelter limit not only make the lives of people who have already endured extreme hardship needlessly difficult but call into question the city’s financial management and run contrary to the promises senior officials have made in the past. That being said, city council bills prohibiting such limits, such as that sponsored by councilmember Shahana Hanif, would protect New Yorkers’ right to shelter, enabling them to live with a roof above their heads as everyone deserves.4

A “City of Immigrants”

According to Mayor Adams, as he announced “Project Open Arms” to support asylum seekers’ education, New York City “has been, and will always be, a city of immigrants that welcomes newcomers with open arms.”5 Though this claim has been called into question by various policies throughout the years, the shelter limit explicitly highlights the contradiction in Adams’ statement. Introduced as a “comprehensive plan to support families seeking asylum and ensure children are provided a full range of services to start their New York City public education,” Project Open Arms outlined citywide initiatives to facilitate asylum-seeking children’s education in public schools, including pop-up Family Welcome Centers to assist with enrollment and provide school supplies.6 In stark contrast to this plan, Adams’ 60-day shelter limit for asylum-seeking families, in many instances, relocates families to a new shelter after 60 days, putting distance between them and the public schools in which their children have been enrolled.7 

This hard-line approach towards asylum-seekers has been noted by other senior officials within the city government, who have drawn attention to the harshness of Adams’ policy. Calling the shelter limit, which is halved to only 30 days for single adults, “some of the cruelest policy to come out of [City Hall] in generations,” New York City Comptroller Brad Lander announced that his office would launch an investigation into the policy in early January 2024.8 In his open letter to Mayor Adams, he writes that his office is “concerned about the potentially harmful impacts of the policy on families seeking asylum, and especially on children who may be displaced from their public school by being transferred to a shelter far from their school.”9 

Beyond the additional difficulties it imposes on asylum seekers, Lander calls into question the “impact and associated costs of…the process and implementation of the 60-day rule,” suggesting not only that the policy harms families but also that it could negatively impact the finances of the city at large.10 His letter to the mayor does, after all, come only months after Lander restricted Adams’ ability to make emergency contracts to procure goods and services for arriving migrants; having found lags and omissions in the Administration’s reporting of subcontractors, Lander’s office required Adams to receive pre-approval for many such contracts.11 Seeing as migrants in line for reticketing at St. Brigid are offered a free plane ticket to a global destination of their choosing, it seems that Adams is similar to the Texas officials who bused so many of New York’s asylum seekers to the city in the first place, hoping to hand the responsibility for their well-being off to another city, state, or even country.12 Yet, as the weeks-long line at St. Brigid shows, many asylum seekers are not ready to leave the place they have sacrificed so much to reach. Thus, Adams chooses to make migrants’ lives needlessly difficult through policies such as the shelter limit and, in doing so, quite possibly costs the city money that could have been put towards supporting New York’s newest arrivals.

A “Substantial Fiscal Disruption” 

Having transitioned away from his “city of immigrants” rhetoric, by fall 2023, Mayor Adams had begun to paint New York’s influx of asylum seekers as a problem in need of solving. In a September 2023 press release announcing Adams’ plan for “stabiliz[ing] the city’s finances” as the city saw an influx in asylum seekers, City Hall warned that the city could face “substantial fiscal disruption if circumstances do not change.”13 Such disruption, the Adams Administration estimated, would be to the tune of 12 billion taxpayer dollars over the course of the next three fiscal years.14 

However, recalling Lander’s investigation into the impact and costs of Adams’ 60-day policy puts this eye-catching statistic into perspective. Using his since-revoked emergency powers, during the initial months of the migrant influx, Adams signed contracts with many private, for-profit service providers—as opposed to the nonprofit service providers contracted by the Department of Homeless Services, which oversees the city’s existing shelters—some of which have less-than-credible backgrounds.15 Take, for example, DocGo, a mobile health services company that shifted its focus from COVID response to migrant support as the pandemic declined. After Lander’s initial refusal to sign off on the contract, Adams approved a $432 million no-bid deal with the company, agreeing not only to have the company house asylum seekers but to put DocGo in charge of services such as case management, medical care, food, transportation, lodging, and security.16 Beyond the cost of the contract to city taxpayers, DocGo has potentially harmed asylum seekers, with the New York State Attorney General launching an investigation into the company’s treatment of migrants within its care. Allegedly, it has inaccurately informed asylum seekers about employment opportunities and facilitated their enrollment in healthcare plans for which they are ineligible.17 

With the city hiring companies like DocGo to care for its asylum-seeking population, it seems reasonable to question how much of the “substantial fiscal disruption” correlated with the influx of asylum seekers could be avoided if for-profit contractors were more thoroughly vetted—as the Comptroller’s Office seeks to ensure that they are—or, better yet, not a for-profit at all. Indirectly, the Office of Management and Budget has done just this in its fiscal year 2025 Financial Plan Summary, in which it provides “renegotiating rates and rebidding for services in shelters currently relying on for-profit vendors” as one way to “bend the cost curve” of “helping migrants take the next steps in their journeys.”18 Further, the Office mentions “transitioning from costlier [Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers],” the NYC Health + Hospitals-managed shelters that employ private contractors such as DocGo, “to a non-profit shelter model,” presumably similar to that used by the Department of Homeless Services.19 Thus, while the city’s support of asylum seekers will necessarily incur costs, focusing on contracting only carefully vetted service providers would reduce these costs, lightening not only the financial burden on taxpayers but also the burden of potential abuse that asylum seekers face in disreputable contractors’ care. 

Still, in the same Financial Plan Summary that proposes a shift away from for-profit service providers, the Office also cites its 30- and 60-day shelter limit notices as a means of further “bending the cost” of supporting asylum seekers.20 Here, the Office begs the question: Is it “bending the cost” if the majority of people who have received such notices have left the city’s shelter system altogether?21 The cost of supporting these people is not being bent but rather eliminated. While the Adams Administration may consider asylum seekers’ leaving the shelter a success, it does not track where the people who leave end up.22 It has been left to journalists to refute Adams’ assurances that no one who has left a shelter has been forced to sleep on the street as a result; in their interviews, asylum seekers tell stories of sleeping on the street, on the subway, in mosques, or housing that is not kept to code—as in the case of the asylum seekers offered housing in the basement of a Queens commercial building.23 These stories and the shelter limits that create them are anything but a success for New York City. Any time any person—regardless of national origin or immigration status—sleeps on the streets, it is a failure on the part of the city in which they live.

Affirming the Right to Shelter 

Even leaving aside the assertion that, in a city as wealthy as New York, every person should be provided shelter without qualification, the city’s legal right to shelter, its room for improvement in managing service provider contracts, and its failure to ensure that those who leave shelters find sustainable living arrangements prove the need to do away with shelter limits. In Councilmember Shahana Hanif’s words, “these notices are creating further chaos and confusion for a group of people who are here to start new, safe lives, dignified lives.”24 As such, Hanif has proposed a bill (Int. No. 1212) that “would prohibit any city agency from imposing limits on the length of the time an individual or family may remain in shelter or emergency congregate housing,” provided they are eligible for housing assistance under State law.

While there is still work to be done to facilitate migrants’ transition to life in New York City, Hanif’s bill provides a crucial starting point. Shelter does, after all, provide asylum seekers the security they need to establish themselves in their new city. Without shelter, basic necessities such as food and hygiene become luxuries, forcing people to focus on meeting their immediate needs rather than planning for their future in New York. Further, a roof over one’s head does not provide healthcare, document assistance, or a work permit. It is a bare minimum. When a person does not have the money to get treatment for illness and injury, is legally prevented from providing for themselves by working, and cannot even return to their country of origin due to lack of documentation, only to be forced to sleep on the street because their housing ticket has expired, it makes sense that they would feel like “nobody,” or “the last wheel of the car…[and] disappointed,” even though they are “putting the effort in.”25 So, even if it would only remedy one of the many problems asylum seekers face, it is essential that the City Council pass Hanif’s bill and end New York City’s shelter limits. It is the humane thing to do.