NEW YORK — Mayor Eric Adams is facing pushback for some plans the city is considering to house newly arrived migrants.
They come to America in search of stability, but many instead find themselves shuffled from city to city.
At the Port Authority Bus Terminal, one woman pleaded not to be relocated again after she was put on a bus from El Paso, Texas without her family.
To house the unprecedented surge of more than 11,000 migrants the last few months, on CBS2’s weekly political show The Point, the mayor told reporter Marica Kramer he is considering using cruise ships as temporary housing.
“We are looking at everything to see how do we deal with this,” Adams said.
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Sources told CBS2 the mayor’s chief of staff already spoke with leaders from Norwegian Cruise Line and even stayed on one of the company’s ships in France last month for research purposes.
Homeless advocates, though, oppose the idea.
“We want to make sure people have access to transportation, and their kids can get to school, and that if they have work authorization, they can go to jobs. And all that becomes much more challenging if people are sheltered literally on the margins of the city,” Jacquelyn Simone, policy director for Coalition for the Homeless, told CBS2’s Christina Fan on Monday.
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Aside from practical concerns, Simone says the optics of sheltering migrants out of sight is a negative one.
“We need to invest in what we know works and that is permanent affordable housing, as well as high-quality shelters,” Simone said.
Back in 2002, the Bloomberg administration floated a similar idea to use cruise ships no longer in service as accommodations for the city’s more than 37,000 homeless people. However, the plan was eventually scrapped due to criticism.
When asked Monday, Mayor Adams said, “We are not going to leave any stone unturned. Once we finalize our plans, we are going to announce it.”
