“Soon, We Will be a City That Has Run Out of Room,” Says Mayor Adams

By Yehudit Garmaise
“It is not ‘if,’ it is ‘when,' [many more migrants]” are going to be sleeping on our streets,” warned Mayor Eric Adams yesterday at his press conference at City Hall. “We are going to do the best we can.
“But I want to be honest with New Yorkers. You are going to soon see the visual of a city that has run out of room.”
In a City that already counts more than 86,510 homeless residents, Mayor Adams emphasized, “We need to house 126,000 people. We are getting 4,000 new migrants a week.”
After months of calling on President Joseph Biden to reconsider his immigration policy, Mayor Adams said he was “happy that my colleagues across the country are joining this chorus that I have been singing that [this number of migrants coming into the U.S.] is not sustainable.”
“We constantly have to find places [for migrants to stay,] and push back to those who tell us, “Not on my block,” said the mayor, who called finding housing for so many migrants “a tactical nightmare” for himself, Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services, and Camille Joseph Varlack, the mayor’s the chief of staff.
“We have to think about [new] configurations,” said the mayor, who added that City Hall is always searching for a supply of affordable apartments. “We constantly are pivoting and shifting to find new locations, but every night, night after night, it is done.”
"To New York City’s credit," the mayor added, “No other municipality has done what this City is doing [in terms of housing migrants.”
Mayor Adams calls the City’s accommodation of 126,000 migrants “unbelievable” and “a miracle,” and he doesn’t want to hear any complaints.
“When people sit back and critique it without providing any real solutions, we have to ignore all that noise because we know what it takes to pull this miracle off every night.”
After many New Yorkers critiqued Adams’ announcement yesterday that migrants must leave shelters after 60 days, the mayor welcomed residents to, “Come up with some tangible ideas. Criticism is not an idea. People keep saying, ‘Build more housing.’ Yes, that is what we are about, and we want people to help up in Albany and be a part of the solution. But more housing will take years. And we have a problem right now. It is easy to be on the sidelines and say what the City is doing, but the City is out of room.”