Mayor Zohran Mamdani has signed an emergency executive order that would require the city to create a plan within 45 days to close or renovate the city’s emergency migrant shelters, City Hall announced.
The Department of Social Services and Department of Homeless Services, in conjunction with the Law Department, must create a plan by Feb. 19 for the city’s emergency shelters to come into compliance with the city’s laws governing maximum capacity requirements and cooking facilities in shelters for families, according to the order.
Those rules were previously suspended under a series of emergency executive orders signed by former Mayor Eric Adams — the first of which was signed in October 2022 — to manage an influx of tens of thousands of migrants into the city’s shelter system.
To manage the influx, the Adams administration erected a series of ad-hoc shelters in hotels, sprawling tent camps, and other makeshift facilities. Some megashelters housed thousands of migrants, but many of those facilities have since closed as the number of migrants entering the shelter system, as well as the country, has declined since mid-2024.
The Legal Aid Society and Coalition for the Homeless issued a joint statement calling the new mayor’s directive an “encouraging step in the right direction.”
With the city no longer facing an influx of new arrivals “at the high levels seen over the past three years … a crisis framework is no longer appropriate or necessary, nor is it a substitute for a humane, durable housing and relocation strategy,” the statement said.
The city was operating 261 migrant shelters during the height of the influx, according to a spokesperson for the Adams administration. At the end of December, the spokesperson said that the city was operating three emergency shelters outside the traditional shelter system run by the Department of Homeless Services.
Another 200 migrant shelters, mostly in hotels, were absorbed into the DHS system.
This story was updated with additional comment.
