Last summer, as New York City was in the throes of a migrant influx from the southern border, residents near the Brooklyn Navy Yard began to notice a growing number of African and Latin American migrants milling around the neighborhood’s parks and sidewalks.
The reason soon became clear. A block away, the city had quietly begun sheltering migrants inside an empty 10-building office compound. Over the next few months, it would become one of the city’s biggest shelter complexes — housing more than 4,000 migrants just a few blocks from a residential neighborhood.
The gargantuan scale of the shelters swiftly tested nearby residents in the liberal enclave of Clinton Hill. Their willingness to welcome migrants soon gave way to a litany of quality-of-life complaints, from littering and loitering to concerns about safety, leading to crowded town-hall meetings and pressure on Mayor Eric Adams to reverse course.
Then, this summer, some of their worst fears came to fruition.
On the night of July 21, a migrant man was shot and killed at a park near the shelter. A few minutes later, two other Venezuelan migrants were fatally shot outside the shelter after two men rode by on a moped and one of them opened fire in an incident that the police believe was tied to Venezuelan gangs.
The shootings, which do not appear related, escalated anxieties among some neighborhood residents already on edge after a stabbing outside the shelter in June.
“They had lives and dreams and mothers and loved ones just like us, and they are gone,” Tim Walker, a Clinton Hill resident, said at a neighborhood rally last week calling on Mr. Adams to reduce the shelter’s size. “It is heartbreaking, it is frightening as hell and it is not a surprise at all.”
Randall’s Island, where the city has built a sprawling tent dormitory for migrants, has also been marred by deadly violence. Earlier this week, a woman was fatally shot and two others were shot and injured at the site; another migrant was stabbed to death there earlier this year.
The incidents are among a spate of high-profile crimes and violent chaos attributed to migrants in New York City and nationwide that have fueled anti-immigrant sentiment. Republicans have used some of those cases to stoke fears about a so-called migrant crime wave besieging the country.
National data does not show that immigrants have led to a surge in crime. In fact, the overall crime rate in New York City is now lower, even as the number of migrants in the city has increased.
City officials have rolled out curfews, metal detectors and an increased police presence at the shelters. On Friday, police officials raided the Randall’s Island facility to search for “dangerous contraband.”
Nevertheless, the recent string of shootings near the Clinton Hill shelter brought renewed focus on the city’s daunting challenge: how to find housing for more than 60,000 asylum seekers in a crowded city without encroaching on residential neighborhoods.
New neighbors and quality-of-life concerns
In early 2023, the Adams administration held a Zoom call with the real estate industry as it scoured the city for properties suitable for repurposing as migrant shelters.
RXR Realty, a developer that supported Mr. Adams’s mayoral bid, offered an appealing location. It was a blocklong industrial warehouse complex, just north of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass, that had been redeveloped into a workplace campus in 2019 with hopes of attracting tech workers and other office tenants.
After the pandemic shattered those hopes, the developer struck a deal with the city in June 2023 that would pay RXR at least $20 million a year to house migrants at the property on 47 Hall Street, with an option to extend the contract for up to seven years.
The deal was mutually beneficial: It would help RXR keep its flailing property afloat after having invested more than $100 million to modernize it, while providing Mr. Adams with a large location to eventually shelter thousands of migrants being bused from Texas. Another building across the block on Ryerson Street, owned by another landlord, was converted into another shelter in April.
To accommodate the migrants, the offices on Hall Street were retrofitted with showers and Wi-Fi. Its warehouse-type floors, once to be co-working spaces, were decked with endless rows of military-style cots. Private contractors were brought in to provide security guards, social services and regular meals.
The highway served as a virtual buffer between the large shelters and the residential parts of the neighborhood. But soon enough, excess trash and food waste spilled over from the shelter area into the surrounding residential streets, irking neighbors.
Complaints arose about migrants loitering on the streets, the strong smell of marijuana and even finding trash in their flower pots.
Some parents stopped taking their children to a small playground because its benches became a popular gathering spot for migrants, most of them young men, but also migrant families with children. And they became alarmed by the sporadic encampments of homeless migrants that popped up under the expressway and at another park nearby where a clutch of migrants regularly sleep on tarps and cardboard boxes.
“They throw the garbage on the street and they don’t care,” said Armando Cantor, 39, a Mexican building superintendent who has lived more than 25 years in Clinton Hill. “This was never like that. It was nice and clean.”
Other residents said they were conflicted, torn between sympathizing with the migrants and questioning the government’s response.
Branko Backovic, 35, a Serbian immigrant who moved to Clinton Hill six years ago, said the United States had a “spiritual” obligation to “share the wealth and to give back as the leader of the free world.”
“Everybody should have an opportunity to have a better life, right?” Mr. Backovic said last week. “The other part of me is, like, are they set up for success? I put myself in their shoes. What if somebody just catapulted me and put me in a new neighborhood in the most expensive city in America?”
Residents and community leaders began to organize.
Two town-hall meetings drew hundreds of attendees, including a surprising and powerful ally: Letitia James, the state attorney general, a Democrat who lives near the Hall Street shelter and promised to elevate their concerns.
A group of neighbors penned a letter to the mayor, calling on him to reduce the shelter to a more manageable size: about 400 migrants. The letter expressed empathy for the migrants, highlighting efforts to provide them with meals, but called on the city to not renew the shelter lease when it expires in April 2025.
The shootings renewed the calls for the city to downsize the shelter, with residents staging a rally last week featuring hand-drawn posters that said “Too Big to Be Safe” and “400 not 4,000.”
“The neighbors want to know when we are going to have the neighborhood back to normalcy or at least under control,” Renee Collymore, the Democratic liaison for the area’s State Assembly district and a vocal critic, said in an interview. “We don’t mind helping the migrants, but Lord have mercy, we need some sanity.”
City officials said they had increased trash collection and security at the shelters. But at a City Hall news conference on the day of the rally, Mr. Adams shot down the idea of relocating the shelter.
“When they say move the shelter, my question to them is where?” he said. “Which community should I move it in? Those who are already oversaturated? Or should we all share the burden of this? No one wants this.”
Migrants find a lifeline on the Brooklyn waterfront
While concerns grew in the neighborhood, the Brooklyn warehouses morphed into an unlikely safe haven for thousands of migrants fleeing poverty, violence and repression.
Its cavernous floors are packed with men from Senegal and Guinea who sleep next to men from Venezuela and Ecuador in cots with white sheets. They keep their few belongings stowed in suitcases and backpacks besides their beds. Families with children, about 900, sleep in partitioned cubicles in a separate building.
Migrants can stay in the shelter 30 or 60 days, but are allowed to request extensions.
Most migrants said in interviews that they were grateful for the free shelter and offered few complaints about the living conditions, however bare, though many grumbled about the dismal quality of the food.
Many leave the shelter in pursuit of work, frequently at restaurants or biking around the city making food deliveries. But many have struggled to find secure jobs because they lack a work permit, English language skills and the ability to navigate an unfamiliar city.
“We don’t know this country,” said Amadou, a 37-year-old from Mauritania in West Africa who declined to give his last name. “We know almost nothing about this place.”
Amadou, who arrived 11 months ago, said he spent his days combing through trash for plastic bottles that he can recycle for five cents each. He can make up to $20 a day.
The area around the shelter is often bustling with activity, packed with migrants who are either languishing or enjoying their downtime.
On a recent visit, a group of Venezuelans lounged in camping chairs next to parked cars under the expressway, listening to salsa music as neighborhood residents commuted back from work. African men cracked jokes in French and Wolof as they sold shampoo, soap, coffee and cannabis for money.
Nearby, David Perez and Raysa Robles, parents from Ecuador, sold sodas for $1 from a cooler they bought with $40 that a cabdriver gave them when they arrived in June.
“We’ve been very grateful with the people who have given us a hand,” said Ms. Robles, 36, while her three children played in the park.
But the shootings this summer have also unsettled some of the shelter residents.
“This is not a life,” said Ousmane Diallo, 21, from Guinea. “This is not enough. We want to live better than this. That is why we fled our country to come here. So that we can live in peace, in security.”
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