Of the thousands of people who’ve ed through an East Village “reticketing site” City Hall opened a month ago to encourage migrants to move somewhere else, just 10% have accepted tickets elsewhere, according to internal data obtained by THE CITY.
Of 5,560 people who’ve gone to the reticketing site, just 570 have taken free plane or bus rides to leave New York City, the data show.
The rate of people accepting age out of the city slumped even more dramatically this week, as hundreds of people lined up in the cold outside for hours waiting for another shelter bed. Of the 442 people who ed through the East Village reticketing site Monday, just three of them took the city up on its offer of a ticket elsewhere, less than one percent, the data obtained by THE CITY showed.
The city opened the facility in late October and now sends all adult migrants to the East Village location as their 30 days in shelter expire, whether or not they want to leave the city. There, they’re guaranteed a flight to any state or country in the world, but not a cot to lie in.
In the month that it’s been operating, the wait time for people seeking another cot has waxed and waned from less than a day to more than five, depending on how many beds are available in shelters across the city and how many migrants newly arriving in New York show up at the Roosevelt Hotel in Midtown, where they have priority over people returning to the system. While they wait for a new cot, men are sent to a facility in The Bronx where they have to try to sleep on the ground.
As temperatures dipped into the 30s on Sunday, capacity collapsed again, with lines of hundreds of men stretching around the block at the East Village site located in St. Brigid’s, a former Catholic school on the corner of East 7th Street across from Tompkins Square Park. People who spoke to THE CITY said they’d been waiting for days for a new shelter placement, most of which they’d spent outside. Of 640 people who showed up at the East Village site Sunday, 237 got assigned a new cot, while 397 were turned away, the internal data show.
‘If We Leave, We Lose Our Spot’
When the East 7th Street waiting room closes each day at 7 p.m., migrants are instructed to take the train to the facility in The Bronx with no cots, before returning to the East Village in the morning to keep waiting.
“We sleep on the floor. They give us aluminum sheets. They don’t give us food,” said Jesus Santander, 28, in Spanish. He added that boss fired him after he had to miss work as a house painter while he was waiting for a new cot. “They just keep saying they have nothing else for us and if we don’t like it, that’s all there is.”
Some said they left The Bronx as early as 3 a.m. to try to secure a spot at the front of the reticketing center line that morning. Others said they hadn’t bothered going to The Bronx, instead opting to sleep outdoors in the cold in order to guarantee themselves a spot at the front of the line.
“If we leave, we lose our spot. It’s hard,” said Franklin Rodriguez, 32, in Spanish, who slept outdoors Sunday — then on Monday fainted and was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Doctors told him he had hypothermia and low blood pressure. They fed him a meal and let him warm up then released him, and he was back on line several hours later, where he spoke to THE CITY while preparing to bed down on flaps of cardboard for the second night in a row.
Will Solis said he, too, was opting to sleep outside on the sidewalk outside the East Village site, extremities wrapped in aluminum blankets, rather than go to The Bronx and lose his spot in line.
“I can’t stand it anymore. My eyes are red from withstanding the cold. I haven’t been able to sleep or rest,” he said.
“They don’t tell us straight, they’re always telling us lies. You have to wait, wait, wait,” he said. “Five days of this.”
Those on line told THE CITY they’d rather wait indefinitely for a cot in New York City than start with nothing in a new place.
“If they send you to another state you start at zero again. Finding a job isn’t easy,” said Gerardo Mendoza, who, speaking in Spanish, said he’d recently found work cleaning hotel rooms. “I have friends who went to Chicago and they’re in the same situation, they’re living in police stations, sleeping in tents. They can’t find work, it’s the same situation.”
Mendoza said he’d been trying to get a new cot since Friday but was still going to his job as a cleaner. Every time he left to go to work he lost his spot in line and had to start over. He said he hadn’t slept in days. The 30 days he’d been allotted wasn’t enough for him to be able to get on his feet.
“In a month you’re just starting,” said Mendoza. “You live losing time, looking for one shelter then another, it doesn’t give you time to get yourself organized.”
Crackers and Tuna
The issues at the East Village reticketing site come as the city’s shelter population has exploded to 121,300 people, including 66,400 migrants, City Hall officials said Tuesday.
“No one should be surprised,” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said at a press conference Tuesday about migrants waiting for hours in the cold. “People have been getting to the ticketing site early in the morning so that they can get on line,” she added, declining to say what the current wait time was for a cot.
“What you’re seeing right now is what we have been predicting for many, many months and it is very difficult because our capacity is full right now,” she said. “If there’s something available, we will give it to them.”
Some community groups and local elected officials tried to do what they could over the weekend. Sasha Allenby, the co-founder of EV Loves NYC, a volunteer group that provides hot meals to locations all across the city, said they brought hundreds of hot meals Sunday and Monday, as well as dozens of donated burgers from 7th Street Burger.
The city doles out snacks of crackers and tuna to those who make it indoors, but not to those waiting outside.
“Crackers and tuna is not substantial for anybody,” Allenby said. “When the food came, they ran for the food. It was almost a mob. They haven’t eaten for so long — we’re deeply, deeply concerned about that.”
Officials have credited a new 30-day shelter limit for adult migrants, implemented in September, for helping them restrict the population to some extent. In a press release Tuesday saying New York City is managing the “national migrant crisis,” the mayor’s office said that “thanks in large part to the city’s efforts helping asylum seekers take the next steps in their journeys, more than half of asylum seekers who have come through the city’s shelter system have found alternative accommodations,” meaning simply that they were no longer in city shelters.
Also on Tuesday, Williams-Isom said only around 20% of single adults whose time expired have sought another shelter cot. After putting single adults on clocks before they had to leave shelters, the city recently began giving 60-day warnings to families with children, which will begin expiring just after Christmas.
The evictions are part of the city’s ramped up efforts to get migrants to leave shelters, as spending on their arrival has ballooned to $1.45 billion. City officials have promised to slash spending on migrants by 20% in the budget cycle.
“We’re not trying to be on a merry-go-round of, ‘go through one door and come out the next,’” said Williams-Isom. “We want people to get resettled in other places, we want people to be ticketed, especially now since it’s cold.”
Ernesto Maruno, 46, who said he’d spent four days waiting for a cot, said he suspected the hunger and cold that migrants like him were enduring was part of the city’s attempt to make them uncomfortable enough to leave.
“They want us to get tired. [To say,] ‘You know what? We’ll go to another country because we can’t put up with it,’” he said in Spanish.
But, he said, a few days without food in the cold — with the expectation of a cot for another 30 days eventually — was the least bad of only bad options.
“Most of us are staying here fighting,” he said.
Additional reporting by Katie Honan.
