The Big Apple’s latest mass “tent city” shelter opened its doors on the grounds of the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens Tuesday — as the city struggles daily to house the sheer number of migrants flooding in.
New York City officials and shelter staffers said they expect to process 100 migrants by the evening.
The newest large-scale emergency site, which took nearly two weeks to construct, will cater to roughly 1,000 adult migrant men in two separate tent structures, local and state officials said.
“I think if you’ve been paying attention to the number of people coming in, 2,000, 2,500 a week … This place will be full very, very quick,” Zach Iscol, commissioner of the city’s Emergency Management Department, said during a tour of the newly opened site.
The huge emergency site, which is being funded by the state, is made up of four structures — including two tents that can sleep 850 and 150 men each, as well as a check-in and dining facility. There’s also portable showers and toilets on site.
It wasn’t immediately clear how much it cost to run the Creedmoor shelter per month, though another tent site on Randall’s Island — also paid for by the state — was slated to cost taxpayers $20 million a month.
Iscol said the ongoing ordeal plaguing the city was “on par and on scale with any major forced migration crisis this country has faced going back to World War II.”
Officials warned that the relentless influx of migrants pouring into the Big Apple each day was unsustainable as they continued to scramble for additional space to house them.
“Today we have close to 60,000 asylum seekers that are currently in our city’s care,” Ted Long, a top official at the city’s public hospital system, said.
“We’ve exhausted everything that we can in terms of converting former office buildings, opening up as many hotels as we can to be able to offer care to the asylum seekers coming into our city.”
The “tent city” at Creedmoor adds to the nearly 200 city-run emergency sites already scattered across the five boroughs.
Furious Queens residents had protested the Creedmoor site ever since Mayor Eric Adams announced news of its construction late last month — with some claiming the influx of 1,000 migrants would “destroy our community.”
Meanwhile, city officials echoed the mayor’s previous calls for additional federal help in tackling the migrant crisis, insisting during Tuesday’s site tour that the extra assistance was “Emergency management 101.”
“When the local jurisdiction is unable to handle an emergency any longer you are supposed to be able to turn to the state government or the federal government,” Iscol said.
