Good morning. It's Wednesday. Today we'll find out about a $25 million program that's struggling to relocate migrant families in New York City. We'll also get details on the proposed congressional map for New York State that Democrats hope will let them recapture the House in November.
Sury Saray Espine, above, with her children, is a rare success story in a state program designed to help migrants. She and her family spent 13 months in a homeless shelter in New York City before moving to an apartment on Long Island, thanks to a $25 million program that was set up to relocate migrant families and ease the pressure on the city's shelter system. The program will cover the rent when a family moves out of a shelter. I asked Dana Rubinstein — a Metro reporter who, with Andy Newman and Wesley Parnell, took a detailed look at the program — to explain its shortcomings. The state emergency services commissioner said in November that this program wasn't working. Why isn't it? There are so many reasons. Many migrants don't want to leave New York City, where there are jobs, where you can get around without a car and where their kids are enrolled in public schools. Buffalo may be the second-largest city in New York, but it's not the place with the international reputation. That's only part of the issue, though. The state is only sending migrants to counties where county executives have expressed an openness to the idea, and those are few. Last year, an effort by Mayor Eric Adams to send migrants to hotels in upstate counties was met with pushback. Dozens of local governments across the state issued executive orders to block migrants from moving there. How did the officials running this program avoid rekindling those tensions? The state reached out to counties that seemed open to having migrants settle there. That is why this program is operating in only five of the state's 62 counties. Two of them, Suffolk and Westchester, have relatively high rents because they're close to the city. The proximity makes them desirable. But in Central Islip — where Espine moved, in Suffolk County — the average rent for a one-bedroom apartment is $2,144 a month, according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development. In Buffalo, it's $992 a month. And this week, after our article about the program was published, the Suffolk County executive, Ed Romaine, issued a statement that said that moving Espine's family to Suffolk may have violated an executive order that he issued on Feb. 6. But the program has barely eased the pressure on the shelter system. Only 174 households have found homes. That's only about 14 percent of the number the program was supposed to help. It's not clear that the state has been marketing the program effectively to migrants. The state has blamed the city for not sending along enough potential participants. City Hall, in turn, has expressed impatience that the program has rolled out slowly.
Finally, there's the landlord issue. New York has a severe housing crisis, and it's not always easy to find apartments that will be affordable after the yearlong rental subsidy expires. Nor is it always easy to find landlords willing to welcome a tenant who does not yet have a work permit and therefore has an uncertain earning potential. The program is aimed at reducing the migrant shelter population in New York City. What happens if people in shelters don't want to leave the city? The state has been abundantly clear that this is a strictly voluntary program. No migrant has to leave New York City, which has a long history of absorbing large numbers of immigrants.
The issue for most of the migrants in shelters is that the federal government lets them enter the country but does not immediately grant them work permits. So they're in limbo, unable to get a legitimate job that would provide the income to pay rent. Finding apartments for people in shelters is also cheaper, isn't it? It is, interestingly. This is a $25 million program aimed at resettling 1,250 families. That works out to $55 per household per night. New York City is spending nearly $400 per household per night for the migrants in shelters. What has the state done to induce migrants to leave shelters — and landlords to take them in? The state has started producing some marketing videos touting these counties to migrants. They are also offering bonuses of up to $15,000 to landlords for participating in the program.
Illinois has found apartments for nearly 4,700 households after starting a comparable program 14 months ago. How different is the New York program? It's different, for sure. The Illinois program is less restrictive in many respects. It resettles both individual migrants and families. It's open to all migrants who arrived in Chicago before a particular date, not just migrants who have already applied for asylum and are on track for work authorization, as in New York. And whereas the New York program is aimed at moving migrants outside of New York City, the Illinois program lets migrants resettle in Chicago as well as elsewhere in Illinois. WEATHER Expect showers with a high in the low 60s. At night, rain will continue as temperatures drop to the low 30s. ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING In effect until March 24 (Purim). The latest New York news
We hope you've enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times. The Democrats' map tilts things their way, but only slightly
On Monday, Democrats in New York said no to a congressional map proposed by the state's bipartisan redistricting commission. On Tuesday, they proposed where they wanted new district lines to be drawn. The plan showed surprising restraint. It called for only a slight tilt in places that would favor Democratic candidates. Democratic leaders are counting on the redistricting to help them recapture the majority in the House. But they do not want another down-to-the-wire court fight like the one in 2022, which was initiated by Republicans and arguably ended up costing the Democrats seats in the House. If the Democrats' plan is adopted, the biggest changes would affect Central New York and Long Island. With relatively small shifts, the Democrats' map would make Representative Brandon Williams, the Republican incumbent in Syracuse, vulnerable to a challenge. The new map would also make the district that Representative-elect Tom Suozzi won in a special election two weeks ago more Democratic. Suozzi is to be sworn in today. My colleague Nicholas Fandos writes that Dave Wasserman, a prominent House elections analyst, called the proposed redistricting a "mild/moderate gerrymander." But Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a Harvard law professor who studies the issue, described it as "pretty much a model of neutrality." Privately, Democrats close to Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader, said the proposed map was a targeted improvement that could survive the kind of legal challenge that torpedoed the far more aggressive redistricting plan that the Democrats pushed for two years ago. METROPOLITAN DIARY Answering
Dear Diary: This happened years ago, when I still relied on an answering service that employed actual human beings to answer calls and take messages. I was at a McDonald's near my apartment, at the intersection of West 71st Street and Broadway. As usual, there was a line. The man in front of me at the counter was taking forever to order. "What's taking so long?" I muttered under my breath through clenched teeth at a barely audible volume. "C'mon already." The man turned around. "Hey, you're Kevin Goldman," he said. "I recognize your voice. I'm with your answering service, and we speak when you get your messages." His food came, and somewhat awkwardly I stepped up to order. I bought an answering machine soon after that. — Kevin Goldman Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here. Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B. P.S. Here's today's Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here. Francis Mateo and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at nytoday@nytimes.com. Sign up here to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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Wednesday, February 28, 2024
N.Y. Today: Sputtering effort to relocate migrants
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