In this space last week, when commenting on the dilemma New York City Mayor Eric Adams was facing in response to the estimated 13,600 migrants, most of them Venezuelans, that have recently been sent there from Texas, we asked, “NYC on the Brink: What to Do?”
At first Mayor Adams seemed to be considering the Martha’s Vineyard route: i.e., immediate export of the newcomers to someplace else, which in Adams’s case would have been upstate New York.
Obtaining mixed reviews on that notion, a few days later he floated the idea of renting out Norwegian cruise liners, but that ship never sailed either.
This week, the mayor seems to have downsized, if not the problem, then at least the solution. Yesterday, city workers began setting up the first of several planned tent cities. This initial one will consist of five tents in a parking lot at the Orchard Beach park in the Bronx, with enough beds to house a total of 1,000 adult migrants. (Families will be sheltered elsewhere in tents with different configurations.) The City says each migrant will be housed there only as long as it takes to arrange a bed in one of the City’s numerous (and currently overloaded) formal shelters.
Not all of the Orchard Beach locals are on board with the mayor, as you might expect. One 76-year-old Puerto Rican man told the Post that he used the park daily to escape city noise and breathe fresh air and that he was none too happy about the news. “We don’t want this. We come here to enjoy the beach. We bring our families here to have a picnic. I don’t live far away from here and the value of my house will go down.”
The local man’s concerns about safety are shared with some of the Bronx city officials. Councilwoman Marjorie Velazquez (D-Bronx), whose district includes Orchard Beach, told the Daily News that she had asked NYPD to add police to the area. They were “very receptive” she said, though they are already experiencing an officer shortage.
Otherwise, concern about sanitation in the tents has surfaced, with attention being drawn to the fact that “the public bathrooms at Orchard Beach have long been in dire need of repairs.”
Another major concern is the weather–in particular, cold weather. Night time winter lows in New York average in the twenties, and the city receives about two feet of snow every year. But city officials insist the tents will be “weatherized and able to withstand the cold and snow that can come with a New York winter.”
And finally, to cap off the Mayor’s problems, there’s a legal theory going around among homeless advocates that the planned tent cities violate New York’s “right-to-shelter law.” That decades-old law requires the city to provide people with “safe and adequate” shelter, which they argue may be too ambitious a claim to make for mere tents.
You wonder how long it will take until the Venezuelans begin to wish they’d stopped a little short of this reputed Land of Milk and Honey, say in Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica. . . .
For more, see New York Post.