Critics want Mayor Adams to push NYC landlords to make vacant apartments available for migrants

Mayor Adams has called on people of faith to help asylum seekers at the city’s food pantries.

He’s begged — and attacked — President Biden when it comes to getting more support for the 65,000 who’ve come to New York City since last spring.

And more recently, his legal team petitioned the state Supreme Court to limit the scope of the right to shelter law to alleviate pressure migrants have put on the city’s homeless shelter system.

But one thing Adams has generally avoided doing publicly is calling on the city’s landlords to make their vacant apartments available for migrants.

Critics are now asking why.

“I don’t think it’s a priority for them,” Deputy Council Speaker Diana Ayala said of the mayor’s team. “Why hasn’t that conversation been had with private owners of residential buildings that have been sitting warehoused in my community for decades?”

At the very least, she said, the mayor should be using his bully pulpit to persuade landlords to step up their service to both the city and the people in need who his administration is struggling to serve.

The number of so-called warehoused apartments in the city is not entirely clear, but some have estimated there are more than 90,000 of them. This has led Ayala, who represents East Harlem and parts of the Bronx, and others to question why Adams has pursued policies like housing migrants in school gymnasiums, while foregoing efforts — at least publicly — to use actual apartments that may be more suitable for temporary living.

Councilwoman Gale Brewer, a Manhattan Democrat, agrees — especially given that the administration has signaled to the federal government, the city’s press corps and the general public that the city is quickly running out of ways to shelter migrants.

“There should be more outreach,” she said. “If you have an empty building, a vacant building, it’s probably less expensive than what we’re paying for a hotel.”

In recent weeks, the mayor rolled out a policy of housing asylum seekers in school gyms, he’s attempted to house migrants in other locales like Rockland and Orange County, and he’s called on all city agencies to identify city-owned buildings that could be used as temporary shelters.

He has also been consistent in his criticism of the president, who he’s called on to expedite work permits for migrants and deliver more cash assistance to the city.

But many believe Adams hasn’t tapped into all of the options available to him as mayor.

“I’m enormously sympathetic about what a huge challenge this is,” said Christine Quinn, a former City Council Speaker who now heads the homeless services provider Win. “But you are more compelling when you have exhausted every option in your power, and that has not happened.”

Councilman Chi Ossé, a Brooklyn Democrat, said the reason Adams hasn’t publicly called on landlords to step up is because they represent a significant portion of his donor base.

“He doesn’t want to piss off his base, and I think that’s creating obstacles,” Ossé said. “It’s unfortunate to see.”

When asked to respond to such criticisms, Mayor Adams suggested they’re unfounded and said lawmakers need to offer more solutions, a common refrain from him in recent weeks.

“We are looking at everything, including the warehousing of apartments,” he said. “This is not just the mayor’s role to navigate the city out of a crisis. They cannot be on the sidelines saying why isn’t the mayor raising this. We all have to raise these issues that impact our constituencies.”

Ayala shot back that raising such issues and offering assistance is “exactly what we’re trying to do.”

“We’re trying to help him,” she said.

Some say the warehousing issue isn’t as simple as just placing migrants in vacant apartments, though.

Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso recently highlighted that 89,000 rent-regulated apartments “might” be sitting vacant and that the city should use them to house migrants. He’s called on the City Council to pass a bill that would require landlords to prioritize renting to the city at market-rate prices and ban landlords from refusing to rent apartments to the city during the migrant crisis.

But Jay Martin, executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, said Reynoso’s 89,000 estimate is deceiving. While the figure may be generally accurate, Martin said many of those units are in the process of being let and that many others are what he described as “permanently vacant” — meaning that they’re in such disrepair that renting them out any time soon wouldn’t be realistic.

“They’re clearly not understanding how difficult this is,” he said of elected officials’ push to use so-called “warehoused” units. “The bottom line is if there were a better system to transfer people from shelter into permanent housing, none of this would be the crisis that it is.”

Sources inside the Adams administration told the Daily News they’ve reached out to landlords privately to discuss housing migrants in their properties, and a spokesperson for the Real Estate Board of New York, which represents building owners, said that the board itself has recently reached out to its members to pass along the city’s interest in identifying spaces.

“The migrant crisis is a challenging issue for our city and we commend the mayor for taking it on,” said REBNY President Jim Whelan. “REBNY is actively engaged with the administration and other stakeholders to help determine humane and effective solutions.”

The administration isn’t only catching heat over privately-owned vacant apartments. According to city records obtained by The News, 2,646 apartments that are controlled by the city were still sitting vacant as of March 31. And Council Speaker Adrienne Adams has also seized on the fact that nearly 7,000 New York City Housing Authority units are currently sitting empty.

She recently pointed to a $30 million cut to NYCHA’s Vacant Unit Readiness Program — a cut the mayor has maintained in his recent executive budget — as counterintuitive when it comes to managing the migrant crisis.

The already-in-place budget cut, she said, has led to repairs to vacant units taking approximately nine months.

“NYCHA’s own data shows that due to these delays, the number of vacant apartments grew from 490 in December 2021 to over 3,300 in December 2022, and up to 6,583 vacant units as of April,” she said. “It is confounding that the administration would continue with cuts to a program that repairs and rehabilitates these units when we desperately need more housing and have apartments sitting vacant under the city’s own control.”