A Manhattan Supreme Court judge signaled Friday that she is considering putting the state on the hook to provide more assistance for the migrant crisis to City Hall, putting new pressure on Gov. Kathy Hochul and Albany lawmakers.
Justice Erika Edwards ordered the Adams administration to file a wish list of items and funding it would like to receive from state authorities by Wednesday and set an August 15 deadline for the governor’s office to respond.
Edwards oversees the city’s shelter system and its compliance with decades-old legal agreements that form the Big Apple’s “right to shelter,” which requires City Hall to provide a bed to any person in need.
“The state has obligations here that they have not met, they’ve kind of left the city out here to do it themselves,” said Joshua Goldfein, the Legal Aid Society’s top lawyer in shelter cases, who attended the closed door hearing.
“What we’ve seen is that on the state side, no one has been treating this as an urgent matter and the result is that the city has not had the resources that it needs when it needs them,” he added. “The judge made it clear that the state needs to start treating this as an urgent matter and that they have responsibilities they have to meet.”
The hearing came just days after newspapers published heartbreaking photos of dozens of recent arrivals forced to sleep on cardboard in front of Manhattan’s temporary intake center, the Roosevelt Hotel, grabbing the city’s attention and putting the Adams’ administration back on the defensive.
Hochul’s office declined to comment, citing the pending litigation.
So far, Hochul and state lawmakers have provided $1 billion to help cover the estimated $4 billion-plus tab to house and provide social services to the roughly 50,000 migrants currently in City Hall’s care. That’s approximately half of the estimated 95,000 asylum seekers who have arrived over the last year as the crisis built.
Federal authorities have coughed up just another $142 million, an amount that Mayor Eric Adams and city lawmakers across the political spectrum have regularly attacked as significantly insufficient.
However, Hochul has not escaped Adams’ criticism either — though he rarely references her by name, a tact he repeated in the statement he released after the hearing.
“We need all of our partners to step up and treat this crisis like the emergency that it is, instead of abandoning New York City to provide shelter and care for more than 95,000 asylum seekers by ourselves,” he said.