Harlem organizers, enraged over the city scouting an abandoned luxury building in their neighborhood as a possible asylum seeker shelter, called an emergency meeting at NYCHA’s St. Nicholas Houses community center in Harlem last week. Mayor Eric Adams made an impromptu visit to plead his case to Black residents—twice.
Harlem is a historically Black community despite a wave of gentrification and displacement in recent years. Many of the residents who packed into the community center on Thursday, Feb. 15 have lived in the neighborhood for decades, a last bastion of what made Harlem in the first place.
“Migrants and asylum seekers are not going in the spot,” said Adams to a room full of concerned residents. He assured people that the building would be designated for survivors of domestic violence and their families from the district. The Mayor did not say that the building could be used as affordable housing at this time.
The meeting was convened by Silent Voices United and the St. Nicholas Houses Resident Association after community members discovered movement and bunk beds inside the building that had been dormant since 2010. According to the city, the original developer went bankrupt and the new owner was going to lease the building to a nonprofit with the assumption that it would be used as a shelter. The community realized the city had not held a public forum or informed Community Board 10 of any plans for the 53-unit building in question at 2201 Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Blvd. Organizers angrily railed against resources not being prioritized for residents and put the word out to come together to stop it.
“We’re oversaturated. We’re done,” said longtime Harlem resident Regina Smith, deputy director at Harlem Business Alliance. “I seen this before. We don’t like it. We don’t appreciate the lack of representation we’ve gotten from the Democrats or let’s go back to Bloomberg, the Republicans. We don’t like the way the state is treating us, we don’t like the way Congress is treating us, we don’t like the way the country is treating us. As Black people we are constantly dumped on.”
Residents viewed the city’s furtive haste to convert the building to a shelter as an extension of the same prejudiced treatment Harlem has received in the past. In short, people were hurt that such treatment would continue under the leadership of the city’s second Black mayor. The emotion of it all led to a fairly hostile attitude towards Adams and the idea of being overlooked for migrant needs in general.
“Asylum seekers are not Harlem residents. They are not citizens,” yelled one man at the meeting.
Legally, New York City is a sanctuary city and has to house the thousands of incoming asylum seekers. In response, Adams has hastily built relief centers and emergency shelters, converted hotels to shelters, and co-opted community spaces like school gyms—all of which received immense pushback from predominantly Black and white communities all around the city since April 2022. Though Adams shifted some blame on the current handling of the migrant crisis to recent City Council housing laws and backlash against his 30 and 60 day shelter notices, he largely attributed it to state and national immigration problems. Adams tried his best to dispel some of the misplaced hate and vitriol against immigrants themselves at the meeting.
Adams said when Senator Cordell Cleare told him about what was happening last week with the building he was “unaware” but determined to correct course.
More than one resident called for more low-income targeted and long-term housing that fit the community’s needs. There are also several homeless shelters already located in Harlem as well as the state’s only two drug overdose prevention centers (OPCs) that allow monitored drug usage on site, said residents, that contribute to safety issues and “oversaturation” in the neighborhood.
Assemblymember Inez Dickens, who has announced her retirement this year, attended the meeting. She arrived after Adams had left. Dickens resolutely stood with Adams, and reiterated that the migrant crisis wasn’t his doing but a culmination of policies from a former city administration and ongoing federal immigration issues. She also was upset about longtime residents being priced out of housing, oversaturation of shelters and OPCs in the neighborhood, and about the community’s voice.
She called for the abandoned building to be made into affordable housing and for the state to revisit 421-A, which is a viable housing tax incentive program that allows developers tax breaks for new construction of housing with a percentage of “affordable” units that was established in 1971. The program was opened and closed several times since it was first suspended back in 2016. It officially expired in January 2023.
“I don’t care whether you call it 421-A, or 222 or whatever you want to call it. If we don’t have something like that in place, there’s no way in hell affordable housing or income-targeted housing is going to be built,” said Dickens passionately.
To his credit, Adams returned for a second community meeting a few days later held at a much larger venue on Sunday, Feb. 18 at Williams Institutional CME. He again took questions along with his commissioners to dispel any rumors that had cropped up and to soothe community relations.
Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.