Bronx Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) called on the city to stop treating his home borough like “a dumping ground” for shelters, as the Adams administration prepares to move thousands of migrant men to the neighborhood.
“For far too long, the Bronx has been relegated to the status of a second-class borough in New York City and a second-class county in New York State,” the congressman wrote in a letter addressed to Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams this week.
The decision by city officials to choose the borough as the location for a new, 2,200-bed migrant shelter “is typical of the second-class treatment that the Bronx has historically been given,” Torres fumed in the missive, obtained by The Post.
The city is set to convert a South Bronx storage facility into a temporary shelter for migrant men from the troubled Randall’s Island tent city, which is set to close next month.
Residents and workers near the 825 East 141st St. building were outraged, telling The Post this week that their neighborhood has become “oversaturated” with shelters and that city officials didn’t warn them about the new one coming to their neighborhood.
“Neither the State nor the City would ever think of siting a 2,200-bed men’s migrant shelter in the wealthiest neighborhoods—these controversial sitings seem to be reserved only for the poorest communities in places like the Bronx,” Torres wrote in the letter, sent to Adams and Hochul on Thursday afternoon.
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, public records show.
Torres noted the “staggering cost” of sheltering asylum-seekers as he questioned how much the state and city have put towards permanently housing New Yorkers displaced by a massive blaze that ripped through an apartment block in the area in January.
The pol also pointed to the persistent scourge of drugs gripping the commercial area between Melrose and Mott Haven that encompasses Roberto Clemente Plaza known as “The Hub” — asking where the state and city’s priorities lay.
“The State and the City have spent more resources on siting migrant shelters in the Bronx than either has on permanently housing the displaced families of 2910 Wallace Avenue or on permanently dismantling the open-air drug market in the Hub,” he said in the letter.
The congressman — as frequent critic of Hochul who is weighing a run for governor — also raised quality of life issues for his constituents.
“The encampment at Randall’s Island reportedly descended into a hotbed of gang violence. Instead of reducing gang violence in the Bronx, the City is relocating gang violence to the Bronx—something that would [also] never be allowed to happen in a wealthier neighborhood,” he said.
As a final blow, Torres blasted Hochul for what he said was her “catastrophic mismanagement of the migrant crisis.”
“The City has been burdened with an ever-expanding right-to-shelter policy that it simply cannot afford,” he seethed.
“Those who pretend that New York has unlimited resources for unlimited migration is lying to themselves and to New Yorkers. The priority should be the People of New York.”
According to city stats, nearly 230,000 migrants cycled through taxpayer-funded city shelters since the flood of asylum-seekers into the city began in 2022 — and there are now just over 50,000 still in the system.
The highest number of shelters the city was running at one time was 258, that number has now dropped to 190.
City and State officials didn’t return requests for comment.
