In partnership with the New York Disaster Interfaith Services, the Adams administration has finally heard the good word about cooperation with the city’s eager houses of worship to help house asylum seekers. A two year contract will allow an initial 50 congregations to care for up to 19 single adult men each — as much as is possible given existing occupancy restrictions. Compare their welcoming to illegal efforts by other counties to keep migrants out.

Let’s hope the program can get up and running soon; houses of worship were not often designed to sustain people long-term and lack some of the infrastructure to comply with housing regulations, including, in many cases, proper sprinkler systems.

With an expected total accommodation of just under 1,000 asylum seekers, this program won’t replace the city’s existing and emergency shelters for migrants on its own. However, it can serve as proof of concept for finding housing for migrants outside of the standard avenues of shelters and hotels, including with individual volunteers (something, by the way, that this board was imploring the Adams administration to facilitate nine months ago).

While the help from the spiritual leaders is welcome, ultimately what the city really needs is a decidedly more terrestrial intervention in the form of both more funding and concrete logistical support from the Biden administration. With the debt ceiling distraction now put to bed, the president and his team should have more bandwidth and a bit more cash to dedicate to NYC. His turn towards Trump-era border policy is not particularly in keeping with our humanitarian obligations, but it does mean that the volume of people actually entering through the southern border has dropped in recent weeks.

It wouldn’t cost the federal government all that much to arrange for placements and use its existing refugee infrastructure to create a much smoother landing for the asylum seekers that remain, keeping them out of the machinations of people like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. It would save everyone quite a bit of cost and strife in the long run.

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