[Recent immigrants are housed in tents at Floyd Bennett Field in
New York City. “The tents are not safe for children in any weather,
and families should never have been placed at this site,” said a
staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society.]
[[link removed]]

IT’S GOING TO BE A LONG WINTER FOR IMMIGRANTS IN TENTS  
[[link removed]]


 

Luis Feliz Leon
December 21, 2023
Curbed
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Recent immigrants are housed in tents at Floyd Bennett Field in New
York City. “The tents are not safe for children in any weather, and
families should never have been placed at this site,” said a staff
attorney at the Legal Aid Society. _

,

 

As the 11 p.m. curfew approached at Floyd Bennett Field on Tuesday,
the former airfield turned shelter was quietly bustling. People
returning on foot to the tent complex used the light of their phones
to dodge puddles, while others unloaded cases of toilet paper and
other supplies from cars idling in the parking lot near the intake
tent. The rain had stopped and the winds of the night before had
quieted to a low whistle, but the storm and the rapidly dropping
temperatures were still most of what people wanted to talk about.
“You had to be there so you could see it,” Sofía, a Peruvian
migrant who is staying at the shelter with her three children, told me
on her way back to the tents. Her 10-year-old daughter joined in,
imitating the roar of the 50-mile-an-hour gusts that shook the walls.
People were afraid. Everyone slept poorly.

Residents of the 2,000-bed shelter, which opened in November to house
migrant families after the Adams administration said hotels and
shelter space had hit capacity, were bracing for more long nights. The
complex, four massive tents divided into private pods where families
sleep on cots, is heated and fortified with ballasts that can
reportedly withstand winds of nearly 70 miles an hour. But the
dormitories don’t have restrooms, and so the 1,720 people currently
living there are still exposed to the elements every time they need to
shower or use the bathroom in portable toilets stationed nearby. After
Monday’s storm, temperatures dipped below freezing.

These conditions, along with the remote location, were among the top
concerns from advocates in the lead-up to the opening of the facility.
The city says the complex didn’t flood on Monday (though residents
have said water got into the tents), but it is located on a
floodplain. And without easy access to transportation, people are left
to make long treks to school, jobs, and anything else they might need.
“The tents are not safe for children in any weather, and families
should never have been placed at this site,” said Joshua Goldfein, a
staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which has been a critic of
the tents since they were first announced. “As the temperatures
drop, the situation will become much worse.” The facility isn’t
built for “anything beyond basic survival,” he added.

Which is more or less a point the administration agrees on as it
functionally ends the right to shelter and advertises the poor
conditions migrants can expect if they come to the city. “We need to
counteract those forms of communications that are basically saying,
‘You come to the City of New York, you’re going to automatically
have a job, you’re going to be in a five-star hotel,’”
Adams said
[[link removed]] at
a briefing in October. “We want to give people a true picture of
what is here. We are at capacity.”

“No one thinks having families with children living out of Floyd
Bennett Field is ideal,” Kayla Mamelak, the mayor’s deputy press
secretary, said in response to a comment request. “But we are out of
good options.” It feels that way. Estefanía, who is from Venezuela
and also asked that I not use her last name, described the “awful
sounds” of the wind and how she had pulled her 4-year-old into a
tight embrace as the walls billowed: “I thought the tents were going
to fly off. Everyone was out of their rooms because they were
afraid.” She was returning to the site with her cousin Luis, who
lives in Flatbush and had offered to drop her off. “Not even I, who
lives in a building, felt safe,” Luis said of the storms. “Imagine
those living in the tents. They are practically abandoned.”

But not alone. Many of the people outside the complex that night had
come, like Luis, to help out — either with a ride or by dropping
off food and supplies. Mutual-aid groups, including South Bronx
Mutual Aid [[link removed]] and Bushwick Ayuda Mutua
[[link removed]], have provided warm meals and winter
coats to families unable to access city coat drives for lack of an ID.
Some of the people returning for curfew had even found other places to
stay on Sunday after hearing the weather reports, connecting with
friends, relatives, and, in some cases, complete strangers to find a
warm bed for the night. Cristobal, who asked that I only use his first
name, had offered a place to a family from his native Guayaquil,
Ecuador, because he felt afraid for the children. He knew it likely
wasn’t the last time they’d need to stay with him and that he’d
be back. “The storm was difficult,” he said. “Now that the snow
is coming, it will be even more difficult.” Sofía and her children
were already preparing. As she walked into the intake tent, she was
carrying plastic bags stuffed with thermals and warm clothing.

_More articles by Luis Feliz Leon
[[link removed]]_

_Curbed relaunched as part of New York Magazine in 2020 with a
mandate to cover cities and city life with the verve, wit, and
obsessiveness of the original city magazine. Subscribe to New
York here
[[link removed]].
Sign up for our newsletters [[link removed]] and
follow Curbed on Instagram
[[link removed]], Twitter
[[link removed]], Facebook
[[link removed]], and LinkedIn
[[link removed]]._

* Immigration
[[link removed]]
* Housing
[[link removed]]
* New York City
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]