New York Is Full

Since last spring, roughly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in New York City. This is a city of immigrants, welcoming to immigrants, built by immigrants. People who were born abroad make up a third of New York’s population and own more than half of its businesses. Yet the city has struggled to accommodate this wave of new arrivals. Migrants are selling candy on the subways, sleeping on the streets in Midtown, waiting for spots in homeless shelters. Families are struggling to access public schools, legal aid, and health care. They are vulnerable to predation and violence.

It is a humanitarian crisis. The city has scrambled to accommodate these new residents, but Mayor Eric Adams says that New York is officially overwhelmed. “We have reached full capacity,” he said bluntly at a press conference last month. “We have no more room in the city.”

The city’s response to the migrants has garnered fierce criticism from both right and left. Republicans have bashed the mayor for wasting resources better spent on long-standing New Yorkers. Democrats have attacked him for allowing a human catastrophe to develop and trying to shift blame to the state and federal government.

Yet Adams is in some profound sense correct. New York is full. It is too full for young families, new businesses, artists, and retirees. It has been too full for years, if not decades. It desperately, immediately needs to make more space for asylum seekers—and for everyone who already lives here.

The current catastrophe is at one level an acute one: Thousands of migrants began to arrive. Many required temporary housing, housing that the city is obligated by the state constitution to provide. The new arrivals filled the shelters. And when the shelters ran out of beds, the city scrambled to set up new ones in scores of other sites, including hotels, offices, an airport warehouse, and a series of parking lots. But even that was not enough. Migrants are still intermittently sleeping on the streets; others are crowding into substandard, informal housing.

[Derek Thompson: Why Manhattan’s skyscrapers are empty]

Legal-aid lawyers and emergency-service providers have argued that many migrants would have gotten out of the shelters faster if New York City had managed their cases better. “There are a lot of new arrivals who have very specific needs or desires and not a lot of information,” Joshua Goldfein of the Legal Aid Society told me. Some people need driver’s licenses. Some need work permits. Some need a ticket elsewhere in the country. “You would not be full if you had more turnover,” he said. He ticked off a list of the city’s other management failures, including failing to crack down on landlords who refuse to accept housing vouchers.

The state could also do more: barring bedroom communities and towns upstate from refusing new arrivals, for instance. And of course, the federal government—which has an exclusive purview over immigration policy, a multitrillion-dollar budget, and an entire cabinet department devoted to the borders, immigration, and customs—could step in with money, guidance, and administrative capacity.  

Yet the problem is New York’s. And behind this acute crisis is the longer-standing one of an insufficient housing supply.

You can see it by looking at residential-vacancy rates, which have been as low as 2 percent in recent years. You can tell by looking at the size and price of rentals and homes for purchase: The average rent in Manhattan is more than $4,000, and the average home in Brooklyn costs roughly $1 million. You can see it in the shrinking of New York’s middle class and the stagnation of its population and the widening of its income and wealth inequality. Housing supply has simply not kept pace with housing demand, squeezing everyone except for the very rich.

The same forces shunting families to the suburbs are weighing on the migrants. The same forces driving New Yorkers out of unaffordable apartments and into homeless shelters are weighing on the migrants. Migrants cannot afford housing for the same reason that the city itself struggles to raise money for new facilities. New York really is full.

[Jerusalem Demsas: Meet the latest housing-crisis scapegoat]

Isn’t there space in all of those empty office complexes? Couldn’t the city find more space, if not enough? Sure. But converting office towers into housing requires money and time. And setting up new emergency-shelter facilities takes money and time too. The mayor has said the migrant influx might cost as much as $12 billion; this year, the city estimates it will spend more on the migrant crisis than it does on the parks, fire, and sanitation departments combined.

High housing costs have a way of making every problem a housing problem. A homeless person needing help with a substance-abuse disorder needs housing first. A migrant requiring legal aid more pressingly needs a roof over their head. And high housing costs, of course, force millions of vulnerable people into homelessness. “Our homeless-response system has turned into a crisis-response system,” Gregg Colburn, an associate real-estate professor at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments, told me. “So many other systems have failed or delegated responsibility to it.”

The opposite is also true: Low housing costs make other problems simpler to solve. Cheap housing reduces the number of people who become homeless. It also allows the entities providing assistance to do more for less, because their overhead costs are lower. And it frees up lawyers to work on immigration cases, substance-use experts to work on substance-use issues, and mental-health counselors to work on mental-health issues.

There is no easy way for the city to help this wave of migrants, not until housing supply goes up and prices come down, or until the federal and state governments provide much, much more aid. “I don’t know if you guys understand what’s going on right now,” Adams said at a press conference this month. “There’s no housing, folks. There’s no housing.”