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Mayor Eric Adams is looking to shut down shelters for migrants — but his priorities are all wrong.
He announced Wednesday that the city will be closing the crime-infested migrant tent city on Randall’s Island next February, touting data showing that the total number of migrants in the city’s care had dropped for 14 straight weeks.
Adams bragged: “Thanks in large part to our smart management strategies and successful advocacy, we have turned the corner on this crisis.”
Have we?
The same day, The Post reported that the Department of Homeless Services is looking to ink hotel contracts that would secure 14,000 rooms to shelter migrants at least through next year, and maybe three more years after that.
Randall’s Island, which can house up to 3,000 migrants, is in major need of a serious clean up: Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua has set up camp there, using it as a headquarters for its drug-dealing, gun-running and sex-trafficking operations.
But closing it down, while the city still needs places to put the estimated 60,000 migrants still in the shelter system, is not the answer.
The first shelters to close should be the hotel ones, the scourges of once-peaceful neighborhoods across the five boroughs.
They’ve become epicenters of drugs, prostitution and violence, and New York’s poorest communities have suffered the worst of it.
Long Island City, once a relatively quiet ‘hood, has been saddled with a whopping 23 shelters, and the precinct that covers it saw a 12.3% spike in serious crime reports in the first half of this year alone.
Three-one-one calls in shelter-heavy areas have skyrocketed.
Not only do the hotel shelters, and the crime they bring, disrupt New Yorkers’ lives and threaten their safety, they’re a huge blow to the city’s tourism.
As migrants now claim at least 15% of Gotham’s hotel rooms, the cost of finding a place to stay for the night in the Big Apple has soared, driving away tourists.
Long-suffering, tax-paying New Yorkers shouldn’t be sacrificing their communities; Adams’ first goal should be turning these hotel shelters back into hotels.
Start with Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel, a domestic-violence-plagued hellhole where thugs shot a 13-year-old boy last month.
If any shelter deserves to be closed ASAP, it’s The Roosevelt.
Cutting back on migrant shelters is a move in the right direction, but do it the right way.
Crack down on the crime on Randall’s Island; clean it up, keep it open (for now) and start shutting down the hotel shelters and giving New Yorkers their neighborhoods back.