A Bronx neighborhood is up in arms over a 2,200-bed migrant men’s shelter due to open on their block — but officials at City Hall said it’s already a done deal.
What has locals fired up are the plans for a vacant South Bronx storage facility that will now become home for asylum seeking men displaced from the troubled Randall’s Island migrant tent city — just around the corner from “The Hub,” one of the Big Apple’s most drug-addled strips.
“I have never been afraid in the South Bronx. I am now terrified,” a local merchant told city officials at a raucous Bronx Community Board 1 meeting on the plan Monday. “I will have to move. I’m a business person and I live in a building, I work in a building that has four other small business people.
“They will all leave because it is too dangerous,” she said.
But asked if the plan was moving forward despite community objections, Deputy Mayor Camille Joseph Varlack had a simple response.
“The answer is yes,” Varlack said.
The city will pay between $250,000-$340,000 to retrofit the building after approving an emergency contract that did not go through the standard bidding process, records show.
The city was forced to scramble to find space for migrants flooding into the city since 2022, converting old schools and churches into shelters and erecting tent cities at Randall’s Island and at Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn — which has now been shut down.
Word of the plan comes after City Hall said the influx of migrants in the five boroughs has slowed significantly as the number of asylum seekers in city shelters tapers off.
But neighbors of the new shelter said it’s being shoved down their throats.
“Without our vote you guys are making decisions for this community, without our input,” another irate local told the deputy mayor at the Community Board 1 meeting. “How dare you?”
City officials said 90% of the migrants eligible for a spot in the new facility have applied for asylum and are on a path to work authorization, according to a report by NY1.
They said only 6% of migrants in city care are in the Bronx, while 37% are housed in Manhattan, 35% in Queens and 21% in Brooklyn, with just 1% on Staten Island.
“Clearly, communication could have been better before this shelter was cited,” Varlack conceded.
But to the neighborhood, it still feels like the Bronx is being picked on.
“This is a joke,” Melrose resident Martin Rogers said at the meeting, NY1 reported. “This is a dog and pony show, which is also business per usual in the South Bronx.”
The facility is due to open by the end of next month.
