The Hotel Nedia shelter, located at 38-04 11th St. Via Google Maps
Jan. 10, 2025 By Shane O’Brien
Mayor Eric Adams has announced a new round of shelter closures across New York City, including one in Queens.
Among the closures is the Hotel Nedia shelter, located at 38-04 11th St. in Long Island City. This decision comes after 27 consecutive weeks of declining shelter populations across the five boroughs.
The Hotel Nedia shelter is one of 13 facilities citywide set to close by June of this year.
The new closures will result in a capacity reduction of approximately 10,000 beds for migrants in the coming months and include the closure of one of the city’s largest shelters at Hall Street in Brooklyn, which houses approximately 3,500 migrants.
The closures also mean that the Adams administration will have shuttered 46 shelters across the city between June 2024 and June 2025. Adams’ office cited the administration’s “successful asylum seeker management strategies,” and federal border policy changes the city advocated for as reasons for a decline of migrants in the city’s care.
In total, the Adams administration will have closed more than 20% of emergency shelters opened in response to the increase in asylum seekers in the city by June 2025.
In December, it was announced that 25 migrant shelters across New York City and upstate New York had been closed, including four facilities in Queens.
The administration stated that 78% of migrants – or over 178,000 people – who sought care from the city have now taken next-stop journeys, with the city purchasing more than 53,200 tickets to help migrants reach their preferred destinations in the US. Meanwhile, the city’s Asylum Application Help Center has helped complete almost 95,000 applications for work authorization, temporary protected status and asylum since the spring of 2022.
There are currently under 51,000 migrants receiving city shelter services, down from a high of over 69,000 in January of 2024 and out of more than 229,000 that have arrived in New York City seeking city services since the spring of 2022.
Adams also stated that the administration’s policies to reduce the number of migrants in city shelters have helped reduce the city’s asylum seeker spending by $2.8 billion from Fiscal Year 2024 through Fiscal Year 2026.
“The additional closures we are announcing today provide yet another example of our continued progress and the success of our humanitarian efforts to care for everyone throughout our system,” Adams said in a statement.
“We will continue to do everything we can to help migrants become self-sufficient while finding more opportunities to save taxpayer money and turn the page on this unprecedented humanitarian crisis.”
Queens Borough President Donovan Richards said he was “relieved” to see that the surge of new arrivals into the city has “crested,” adding that any resulting strain on city services has subsequently lessened.
He praised the state and federal government for “stepping up” and ensuring that asylum seekers had the resources they needed when arriving in the city but warned that the incoming Trump administration will pose challenges to the city’s immigrant community.
“Make no mistake that as a new, hostile federal administration takes office later this month, Queens will continue to do whatever it can to support our immigrant brothers and sisters and defend our historically marginalized communities from any threat that may potentially come their way,” Richards said in a statement.
Council Member Julie Won, on the other hand, called for equal shelter distribution and resources in all neighborhoods across the city to ensure that asylum seekers can thrive after arriving in New York. Won noted that her district has the highest concentration of migrant shelters in the city and called on the Mayor to provide more resources for local organizations.
“We request the Mayor provide additional resources for our nonprofits and schools to make sure that families are receiving access to health care, mental health services, job assistance and wraparound services,” Won said in a statement.
“Shelters are not a permanent solution. As migrants continue to seek new opportunities in our city, we must create new pathways to permanent housing.”
In addition to the new round of closures announced by Adams on Friday, the city will also open a smaller brick-and-mortar congregate facility on Bruckner Boulevard in the Bronx dedicated to single adult male residents transferred from the tent-based emergency site at Randall’s Island.
The city also plans to partner with local nonprofits that provide services to migrants in an effort to help them move towards self-sufficiency, while the Adams administration stated that the decrease of shelter populations would allow the city to “right size” populations in neighborhoods that previously held a significantly larger number of shelters and migrants during the emergency phase of the city’s response.
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