Mayor’s 60-day shelter rule ‘haphazard’ and ‘arbitrary,’ says comptroller

A new report from City Comptroller Brad Lander found that the city failed to successfully implement policies related to the already controversial 60-day shelter rule for asylum seeker families.  Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach

By Ryan Schwach

The Adams administration’s 60-day shelter limit rule for families was poorly implemented and caused migrants to be haphazardly pushed out of the shelter system, a new report released this week claims.

A newly released report from the Office of Comptroller Brad Lander found that the implementation of the controversial 60-day rule – which evicted asylum seeker families from city shelters after that time frame in an effort to free up shelter space and get asylum seekers into more permanent homes – did little to help migrants move into better arrangements once they left the system. Even after pushing migrants out, the city did little to follow up and ensure they made it into a new home, the report claimed.

“The 60-day policy was implemented in a haphazard and arbitrary way, without adequate written guidelines in place, without training to the staff or contractors, without sufficient notices to families and with arbitrary outcomes,” Comptroller Brad Lander, a frequent critic of the mayor’s handling of the asylum seeker crisis, said from Midtown on Friday.

The 60-day rule, which sparked outcry from lawmakers and advocates last year when it was announced, was intended to help migrants move through the system, and to lessen the financial and logistical burden on the city that was dealing with the massive influx of asylum seekers, the mayor said at the time.

According to the comptroller, as of April 28, the city has issued 60-day notices to 10,229 families with children, affecting 19,497 adults and 18,149 kids. Of those individuals, 51 percent left the shelter system entirely, 40 percent relocated to another shelter somewhere in the system and 9 percent are in the shelter where the 60-day notice was given.

Ahead of the rule’s implementation, the administration had said it would provide case management for migrants to help them land on their feet once moved out of the shelter, something the report argues never actually happened.

“Our investigators found that there's very little case management of any sort,” Lander said. “What there essentially are, are repeated screenings to insist that you must have somewhere else to go over and over and over again. There is no assistance in finding stable housing.”

Though the administration set the goal of conducting up to five “exit planning meetings” with migrants, the comptroller’s office found that those meetings were limited. When they were conducted, officials were more concerned with placing migrants with family members than they were with assisting them in finding permanent housing of their own, the report claims.

The report further found that once migrants moved out of the shelter system, the city did not track where they wound up, or whether or not they actually found suitable living arrangements or gainful employment.

“It was a policy designed to churn people through a system, to subject them to screening after screening, and to push them out of the shelter system with no regard for where they landed, with no regard for the impact on their kids' education, and with no regard for their actual path to stable housing, employment and self sufficiency,” said Lander.

Queens – the borough with some of the highest shelter numbers in the city – has seen some of the negative effects of this lack of policy.

In February, officials found dozens of migrants living in the basement of a furniture store in Richmond Hill in less than ideal living conditions. Some of the migrants there allegedly blamed the new eviction rule for their move to the store.

A report from the New York City comptroller released on Thursday said that the city did not provide adequate help to migrants before they left the system under the city’s 60-day eviction rule, and that the city did not track the migrants’ success once they did move on. Eagle photo by Ryan Schwach

“We saw that horrible situation where folks were in the basement of that store, so we know, and at least in some cases, people are winding up in very dangerous circumstances,” said Lander.

Beyond allegedly not working as intended, the policy was also applied inconsistently, the report said.

According to the comptroller, some families were forced to relocate to other shelters after the 60-day limit hit while others were able to stay with no clear reason why.

Even when the city did create exemptions for some populations, like pregnant women in the third trimester, they did now follow up and create written guidelines for employees to implement that exception.

“No written policy was ever promulgated,” Lander said. “Staff and contractors did not get that information…the policy was not actually established.”

Since the beginning of the policy, which speakers on Thursday called “cruel,” Lander and others had been against it, and say that the fumbled implementation only serves to affirm those previous concerns.

“The findings within the comptroller's report should not be a surprise to anyone who's been paying attention,” said City Councilmember Alexa Aviles, chair of the Council's Committee on Immigration. “The Adams administration designed the 30, 60-day rule to be a bureaucratic nightmare.”

Aviles likened the policy to hostile architecture aimed at limiting homeless populations, like benches that don’t allow people to lie down.

“This policy was simply made to push people out, to disregard their humanity, to disregard their experience, but to make them so uncomfortable that they would self-select to move on despite the real challenges that face them,” she said.

Officials in Midtown on Thursday and the report itself argued that the city should fill the gaps in the rule’s implementation, while also calling for the abolition of the policy at its face.

The report recommends the city create clear written policies and procedures and track the outcomes of migrants who come through the system.

With the end of the school year on the horizon, Lander also called for the city to suspend the evictions of families with school-aged kids.

“Let those kids stay in their public schools and conclude the year with their teachers and their classmates,” he said.

City Hall says that more than 80 percent of kids whose families were subjected to the 60-day rule remained enrolled in their original school.

Immigration and shelter advocates who spoke on Thursday argued that the 60-day policy’s implementation harms a population that can help the city going forward.

“Overall, new immigrants bring so much to our economy and energize our city and are the future of the city,” said Legal Aid Society’s Joshua Goldfein.

Goldfein, a staff attorney at Legal Aid has been one of the lawyers fighting to keep the decades old Right to Shelter mandates in place when the city tried to skirt the responsibility.

That case was settled in March.

“When we have declining enrollment in our schools, and we have labor shortages, this is a time to be investing in helping people make our city better and not pushing them out,” Goldfein said.

In response to Lander’s report, City Hall defended its actions and the 60-day notice policy as it continues to manage the migrant crisis.

“With more than 195,000 migrants coming through our care since the spring of 2022 – more than 65,600 of which are still in our shelter system – and hundreds of more people arriving every single day asking for shelter, our 30-and-60-day notices are one tool in our very limited toolbox to help migrants to exit shelter because, as we have repeatedly said, New York City is long past its breaking point,” said a mayoral spokesperson.

“Nearly half of all families who have seen their 60-day notices expire, and more than 65 percent of all migrants that have come through our care, have moved out of our shelter system — without a single migrant family with children being forced to sleep on the street,” the spokesperson added. “While several suggestions made in the comptroller’s report are already part of our policy, any ideas on how to improve our herculean work are welcome and will be considered.”

City Hall also denied that they do not have a written policy for pregnant shelter residents, and have adequately trained its staff to provide exit planning and guidance to migrants.