Shelters and Their Afterlives: Mobility and Inequality in NYC

Abstract (English)

Between 2022-2024, New York City experienced what the media and some analysts referred to as a "migrant crisis." Historically a center for the concentration of American wealth and more recently a tax shelter for global elites, New York City is also home to some of the most impoverished Americans and non-citizen newcomers. The city's poor and immigrant populations have struggled to recover from both historic dispossession and the global pandemic, while Manhattan remains the US county with the greatest income gap. In 2022, the surge in arrivals of new migrants fleeing poverty, violence and climate disasters in Latin America and elsewhere in the Global South and seeking safety and livelihood opportunities in New York City, strained the city's shelter system and social services. Whereas previous cohorts of migrants to New York City often relied on social networks and were quickly absorbed into the city's established immigrant communities, the refugees, many of them families with children bussed to the city by Texas governor Greg Abbott, relied on NYC's shelter system placing an enormous fiscal pressure on the city and prompting the declaration of a state of emergency (Newman and Fitzsimmons 2022). By 2023, NYC Mayor Eric Adams limited the time that migrants could stay in city shelters to 30 days (Kim 2023), even though attempts to curtail the right to shelter in the city has historically resulted in legal successes for homeless advocates. This happened simultaneously with efforts to rapidly expand the city’s shelter infrastructure through massive public-private contracting with speculative housing developers and private vendors in the areas of health, food supplies, humanitarian groups, and social services, oftentimes ill-equipped to handle the needs of migrants and refugees. This paper examines the rapid rise and fall of the city’s new shelter industrial complex. In the first section, we give a brief background on the shelter politics of NYC since the 1980s and its frail infrastructure even prior to the migrant arrivals. Then we consider the expansion of the business of migrant shelters, and its resulting social ecology, focusing on the city’s emergency contracts outside of regular bidding processes mandated by law. Moreover, we consider the circulation of migrants within these “sheltering logics,” by focusing on the daily operation and public imaginary of two specific shelters: Roosevelt Hotel and Randall’s Island tent shelter. By considering the transit and circulation of people through the shelter system –migrants, refugees, shelter staff, politicians, and others– we trace inter-subjective forms of personhood, as migrants interact with local New Yorkers, especially racialized minority communities. The paper concludes with a discussion of the 2024 downturn of the NYC migrant shelter system.