New York City’s Next Solution to the Homeless Crisis May Be On Staten Island

Asylum seekers arriving in New York City might be housed at a former military base on Staten Island as the city continues to grapple with accommodating thousands of migrants arriving in the Big Apple. 

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and city officials are trying to lease the former Fort Wadsworth military base on Staten Island to house migrants, according to the New York Post. 

Fort Wadsworth was a military installation that closed in 1994 and was turned over to the National Park Service after the U.S. Navy made it the headquarters of Naval Station New York in 1979. Though Army Reserves still train there, Fort Wadsworth is no longer an active duty base. 

City officials need permission from the Biden administration to lease the 226-acre site and use it as an emergency migrant facility to shelter asylum seekers.

Since early May, New York Governor Kathy Hochul has been trying to get approval from the Biden administration to use the site. If the federal government grants that permission, the facility will then be one of the nearly 200 shelters housing over 57,000 homeless asylum seekers in New York City. 

No information was revealed about where exactly the shelter would be built on site or how many asylum seekers it could accommodate. 

Housing migrants at an old military base is one of multiple solutions that city officials proposed to deal with the influx of migrants coming into the city. Mayor Eric Adams said on Wednesday that nearly 100,000 asylum seekers have arrived in NYC seeking shelter since 2022. 

Meanwhile, the DHS reportedly sent an “assessment team” to the site on Staten Island along with staffers from Adams’ office on Thursday to look into a “whole host of locations,” but no determinations were made yet, according to the New York Post.

The Roosevelt Hotel in the city's Upper West Side has been housing migrants, but has reached its capacity, leading some newly-arrived migrants to sleep on the sidewalk outside.

Adams has also considered options at college campuses and tent shelters.

In June, he suggested that city residents could house migrants in spare rooms, CBS News reported at the time.

"There are residents who are suffering right now because of economic challenges. They have spare rooms. It's cheaper and it's a good investment for us to go to a family and assist them instead of placing people in large congregate settings or in these emergency hotels," Adams said in June.