NYC Saves $500 Million in Migrant Costs as Border Crossings Fall

(Bloomberg) -- New York City expects to save nearly $500 million in the current and next fiscal year thanks to a sharp decrease in the number of migrants arriving since the summer.

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In budget documents published Wednesday, the city said it would save $436 million in the fiscal year ending June 2025, and $59 million the following year on expenses related to caring for the city’s newcomers. More than 223,000 people have arrived in the city since early 2022, when Texas governor Greg Abbott began busing migrants to New York en masse from border towns.

The savings, along with better-than-expected tax revenues, will allow the city to hire 1,600 more police officers and spend almost $600 million on cash and rental assistance for low-income families across the city, according to Mayor Eric Adams. The city’s budget grew to $115 billion, up from the $112.4 billion spending plan Adams signed in June.

The number of migrants arriving in New York City has declined significantly since early June, when the Biden administration issued executive orders restricting the amount of asylum-seekers permitted to cross the border with Mexico. In late July, the number of weekly arrivals to New York City dipped below 1,000 for the first time since October 2022.

The city has regularly seen more than 3,000 people arrive each week, a crisis that Adams warned would upend the city’s coffers with billions of dollars in costs associated with caring for tens of thousands of people, and threatened cuts to city services like library hours. Instead, the city ended up spending about $1 billion less than expected in the fiscal year 2024, due in part to new policies limiting migrants’ time in city shelters.

The city is spending $373 a day on each migrant household, down from $395 about a year ago. At that time, there were almost 70,000 migrants living in more than 200 shelters across New York City, compared to less than 60,000 in the city’s care now.

Some City Council members and advocates for the homeless say the shelter limits, which require some families to ask for extensions after 60 days, are causing long-term harm to the children in the city’s care, disrupting their education and causing some to drop out entirely after they’re moved to a new shelter. Data released this week by the city’s Office of Asylum Seekers Operations showed about one out of every six of the 7,600 migrant children living in city shelters have since left the city’s public school system after receiving eviction notices.

On Monday, Adams said the city would allow families with children in kindergarten through sixth grade to remain in their same shelter for longer than 60 days after their second eviction notice, “making it easier for those children to continue attending their same schools,” Adams said.

At a City Council hearing Tuesday on the impact of shelter stay limits, Christine Quinn, president of homeless services provider Women in Need, said the shelter limits “leave countless families in a perpetual state of limbo, creating unnecessary instability while inflicting lasting trauma.”

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