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.
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.
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.