Outreach Groups Navigate a Broken System Amid Migrant Crisis
By Julia Goodell
Mayor Eric Adams gave his 2023 rose and thorn in a press interview Sunday morning. The rose: more private sector jobs. The thorn: New York City’s Migrant Crisis, which is predicted to cost the city over $12 billion in the next three years, and which has sparked dislike for Adams. Happy New Year.
As more than 150,000 migrants have sought asylum in NYC this year and calls for federal aid have been denied, Adams says the city’s resources are stretched thin. Recently, the city imposed a 60-day limit on how long migrant families can stay at one shelter, toeing the legal line of a right to shelter. Attempting to manage the detrimental effects of a lack of effective policy and aid, some homeless outreach services say they’re working double time. Yet operating in and around the overcrowded, limited-resource NYC shelter system proves difficult.
With homemade Sunday meals, case management, peer groups, and HIV/STI testing and prevention, one outreach group named New Alternatives has been helping LGBTQ+ unhoused youth since 2008. The founder, Kate Barnhart, said New Alternatives is centered around creating safe spaces and employing people that their clients can identify with.
Their mission aims to be reachable in a not-so-reachable system, Barnhart claimed. “We make ourselves and the program as accessible as possible. We don’t require a lot of paperwork or ID or we don’t require you to tell us your former name or anything like that. You can just show up as you are, and we try to respect what people are presenting. Also, we let people lead the way in terms of case management… That helps build trust,” she said.
Barnhart asserted that this year New Alternatives has attempted to step in during rising numbers of homelessness, yet outreach groups are largely barred access to aiding migrants. “At first, we were able to treat migrants with housing needs the same as everyone else. But then they [NYC] created this migrant shelter system that’s separate and quite frankly unequal,” she said. “I mean, it’s never going to be a really wonderful system, but the migrant housing shelter is really crappy.” Working with at-risk youth since 1994, Barnhart was referring to years of experience that have given her a somewhat deterministic view of the NYC homelessness system she strives to improve.
Barnhart is not alone in her view as many researchers and activists alike have been fighting for years to change NYC’s homelessness system. A professor at New York University and the author of Housing First: Ending Homelessness, Changing Systems and Transforming Lives, Dr. Deborah Padgett aims through research to make suggestions for improving homelessness systems.
In Dr. Padgett’s experience, the poor conditions of NYC shelters and the city’s attempts to limit research and outside intervention are enduring issues. “The city deliberately keeps shelters off limits to researchers; they do not want the world to know how awful those places are,” Dr. Padgett said. Adding, “In I think 1990, I remember naively calling homeless services asking if there was someone I could talk to,” she began laughing. “I mean, you have got to be kidding, I was naive, I was naive.” Accessing the city’s shelter system as an outside source may be laughably impossible.
According to Dr. Padgett, it is also difficult to navigate researching and providing solutions in times of crisis, such as during the current Migrant Crisis, when people are in vulnerable positions. “For very good reasons I don’t want to do research with these people [Migrants], they’re suffering, they’re in a crisis, I feel ethically really bound not to do that.” As far as solutions to homelessness, Dr. Padgett argues the main problem in NYC is the lack of affordable housing and the city’s reliance on private developers for shelter space.
Cracking into the city’s system as outreach is doable, however. In fact, working within NYC’s budget and system itself are libraries, many of which offer outreach and advocacy programs for unhoused people. The Brooklyn Public Library (BPL), operating 66 branches across its borough, has extended resources for unhoused people in the last few years, especially with the implementation of social workers.
Lisa Shankweiler, social worker and community services manager at the BPL explained how the library is adapting during the Migrant Crisis. “The library has done, through our outreach services and through our different departments, has done outreach to different shelters where we know asylum seekers are being housed to try to get them library cards.” Library cards are not just for checking out books but serve as what’s called a “culture pass,” Shankweiler explained, allowing migrants to experience free events and places around the city that they may not otherwise have access to. The IDNYC Center at the BPL is responsible for administering the cards and Shankweiler claims the IDNYC staff have “…really pitched in with helping to overcome language barriers for folks.”
The BPL also offers legal services for people needing assistance in the asylum process and referrals to mental health resources and housing options. Shankweiler claims, however, that there is a deficit in social workers across the country and with Adams’ library budget cuts announced this November, the BPL is not excluded from such.
As libraries are a trusted space of knowledge and information for many, Shankweiler said “I think we have tried to meet people where they’re at and help them then have access to the library so that then they can have that information.” She later added the BPL is “…just trying to really help them [Migrants] meet their basic needs so that they can start to settle into being in the city.”
While outreach groups step in amid record numbers of migrants and homelessness, working in and around NYC’s homelessness system has been met with bars to access and budget cuts. “We are so far in meeting the demands,” Barnhart said. “And that really is something that the wider world of New York City needs to look at…” But as the city runs on limited resources and budget strife Dr. Padgett emphasized, “It’s more expensive to do nothing.”
