New York’s Shelters Were Packed. Now They Are Bursting at the Seams.

In 2021, New York’s shelter system was under strain, with 61,000 residents. Officials said it was at capacity — or over.

In 2023, the system is on track to house twice as many people.

The population reached an eye-popping record 100,000 this week, thanks to familiar factors — the pandemic, skyrocketing rents — and acute ones: economic turmoil abroad and politicians in America seeking to thrust New York into a border crisis thousands of miles away.

The rush of arrivals from the south has had people living not just in traditional shelters, but in temporary accommodations in hotels, tents and even gymnasiums. The Roosevelt Hotel, which opened in Midtown in 1924 to fanfare and where annual New Year’s Eve radio broadcasts popularized “Auld Lang Syne,” will in coming months turn over all 1,000 of its rooms to migrants.

Officials described this week as a “tipping point” — for the first time, migrants composed the majority of those in shelters. The startling new number of shelter residents is further troubling because of the numbers it isn’t reflecting.

“It’s scary that we are at this benchmark and we don’t even know how accurate it is, how many are unaccounted for,” said Adolfo Abreu, the housing campaigns director at Vocal-NY, a social services agency.

Such an explosion of migrants, which is estimated to cost $4.3 billion by July 2024, would test any American city. In New York, the arrivals were met by a system that had already been under pressure because of factors of the city’s own making.