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By Éric Lach
Four years ago, New York-based real estate advertising firm RXR unveiled “an exciting new opportunity in Brooklyn. “The Hall, as RXR dubbed the development, included ten buildings and more than six hundred thousand square feet of prime space, near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Promotional performances by artists showed staff dressed casually and busily in open spaces. “THE HALL’s exclusive paint campus will activate one of the most dynamic and original communities of creators, creatives, technology visionaries, artists, architects, foodies and replace agents,” RXR wrote.
The pandemic has shattered that vision. Creators and replacement agents worked from home. Commercial real estate costs in New York City have skyrocketed. For three years, the Salon was virtually empty and became one of the least promising houses in RXR’s declining portfolio. Company executives began discussing with city officials the option of rezoning the lobby to turn it into a partially mixed-use residential construction — a confusing and costly political process.
In the midst of one crisis, another arose. Last summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of immigrants from his state to New York in a ruthless political stunt. In part to demonstrate that New York, unlike Texas, was generous and empathetic to newcomers to the United States, officials running for mayor Eric Adams, along with representatives of local nonprofits and networking teams, They show up at the port authority bus terminal to pick up the immigrants. They obtained data on the city’s social and housing laws, which guarantee that anyone who asks for a bed will get one. The right to housing is not new: It is the product of legal victories by homeless rights advocates in the 1980s. But never before have so many immigrants obtained detailed orders on how to access the shelter system. This information was shared with friends and family, in WhatsApp groups and on social networks. People arriving in the city – and not just those arriving on Abbott buses – began to exercise their right to housing. They were soon followed by thousands, which grew to become tens of thousands.
When Adams took office in early 2022, more than sixty thousand people were already living in New York City’s shelter system. As more and more immigrants arrived, the municipality scrambled to find a position for them. Entire hotels were rented, adding the now-defunct Roosevelt Hotel, a 1,000-room Jazz Age relic in midtown Manhattan that has become the city’s immigrant reception center. When even hotel rooms were sold out, the local government built emergency shelters, such as the giant tents on Randall’s Island on the East River. prompting protests from New Yorkers whose young people played soccer on the fields where the tents were set up.
While workplace vacuum rates also reached record highs last year, few corporations were willing to turn workplace buildings into immigrant shelters. On the one hand, workplaces require all kinds of modifications to fit a home, even in the short term: showers, bathrooms, lighting, kitchens, walls. However, in winter, the city government asked local real estate corporations to act if they had space available. In late June, as the city’s shelter population approached 100,000, RXR entered into a licensing agreement. with New York City Health and Hospitals, the city’s public health care system, to build the Hall as a high-capacity, long-term immigrant shelter, a process that could take just several months. Meanwhile, according to RXR, the company has been asked to temporarily construct a short-term “respite center” in two of the Hall’s buildings, accommodating 450 male immigrants. RXR finished the renovations in two weeks.
RXR was paid about $30,000 a month for the relay center structure, a paltry sum compared to the kind of profit the company had anticipated a few years earlier. To staff the respite center, the city government hired a contractor called MedRite, previously known to operate a chain of COVID-19 testing facilities in the city. Most of the guards worked for another contractor, Arrow Security. A third company, Mulligan Security, provided firefighters, tasked with mitigating fire hazards and escorting citizens in the event of an emergency. Together, the three corporations have won contracts that allow them to bill the city nearly half a billion dollars a year.
In July and August, busloads of immigrants arrived at the Hall nearly a day, even after the respite center had surpassed 450 residents. By mid-summer, only about 800 men lived in the hall. Each user checked in at a table on the first floor and was given a facility ID, and a lanyard, passed a stack of registration documents, presented a snack, and won a towel, toothpaste, toothbrush, a small bar of soap, shampoo, a pillow, and a sheet. ” That’s what you had to protect yourself with one and both one and both days,” a lobby resident told me recently. The men were led into cavernous rooms: they looked like old factory workshops, but with new windows and new coats of paint, where cots had been laid out from wall to wall. Young people from all over the world slept inches away from each other. Many had never heard of Brooklyn before. “It’s like a prison,” the resident said recently.
There was no privacy in the room and no position to congregate inside. The men repositioned themselves facing each other. The overhead lights were fluorescent, bright, and controlled by staff. There were a few bathrooms on each floor, but no showers. The city had installed four shower trailers outside containing twenty-four shower heads in total, but only cold water came out. “I’m desensitized to a lot of this nonsense, but it has to do with how shelters operate normally,” a veteran municipal shelter inspector told me. New York City’s right to housing legislation states that the ratio of citizens to showers in a facility must be no more than ten to one. In the room it was more than an hour before thirty. (Emergency shelters of the type created to space out migrants have looser regulations than the city’s classic homeless shelters. ) The wait to go to the bathroom was so long that the men defecated under the showers. Signs were posted in Spanish, French, Simplified Chinese, Russian and Arabic asking them not to do so.
Immigrants were offered three meals a day, but rations were meager. Many citizens I have spoken to have complained of gastrointestinal problems. “Breakfast consists of an orange and a kind of sponge cake,” recalls another recent resident, a Venezuelan. “Lunch is a lettuce and tomato sandwich. Dinner is more of a cake. (A City Hall spokesperson said the hotel’s citizens are presented with several dishes during the meal, in addition to a sponge cake. )
There were few outlets available, so in order to charge their phones overnight, citizens had to leave them plugged in far from their beds. There were robberies and rumors began to fuel interracial conflicts. “The Haitians take the phones,” the Venezuelan told me. He despised all the nervous guards, who spoke mostly English. The Venezuelan showed me a video of guards escorting a guy who had brought food outside to a dormitory. (A City Hall spokesperson said outdoor dining is allowed on the premises. ) Many citizens hoped to obtain asylum or find a way to legally remain in the U. S. There were many U. S. workers, and they were all looking to leave the facility, but the facility, as a respite center, offered no help with immigration files or work permit applications. Most of the time, men had to fend for themselves.
A few days after the opening of the reception centre, a fight broke out in one of the Halle’s dormitories. As one migrant told Gothamist: “I got into my cot and then everyone started pushing each other, and then the security guards started pushing us, trying to corner all the Venezuelans. Subsequently, staff ejected several Venezuelans involved in the fight. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a six-lane highway built through Robert Moses, runs along the south side of Hall’s property. And the evicted men walked down the block, pitched a handful of tents under the overpass, and began sleeping there.
Even in the most productive circumstances, obtaining a permit to paint can take six months or more for a migrant. Meanwhile, in order to earn a little money (and eat anything other than what the shelter offered), the citizens of the Hall carried out several clandestine occupations. Some roamed the streets of nearby neighborhoods, such as Williamsburg, Dumbo and Clinton Hill, where homes and apartments sell for millions of dollars, collecting bottles and cans to trade. Some sold high-top shoes and loose cigarettes. to other citizens. Others presented their facilities as barbers. But sending pictures was the most effective and the riskiest.
To make deliveries, a migrant needed 3 things, all of which charge coins. The first was a telephone with which many of Hall’s citizens came to America. At the moment an immediate means of transport, such as a bicycle or, better yet, a moped. (Some citizens borrowed coins or combined them to buy mopeds. )The third is a fake account on one of the delivery apps, such as Uber Eats or DoorDash. These accounts allowed immigrants to avoid applying under their genuine name, without jeopardizing their asylum claim. I spoke with several immigrants who said they bought their fake accounts from who appeared to be the same man. Some other people said he was a Spanish-speaking gringo who ran a restaurant near the Hall. Others said he was an immigrant, like them. It’s hard to say. Fake accounts can charge between a hundred and two hundred dollars per week, paid in coins upfront, and expire after a week, two, or four, depending on the amount deposited. (A DoorDash spokesperson said that sharing or promoting accounts is a violation of corporate policy. )
In the Hall, citizens thought they could expect to make seventy-five dollars a day making deliveries, but that hope was dashed. If a phone is stolen or a motorcycle breaks down, a resident may not get back what they paid to rent the account, forcing them to start from scratch. Sometimes, at the end of a night when their account expired, a migrant would take an order from a restaurant and simply not deliver it, keeping it to themselves or sharing it with friends.
Eventually, the sidewalks outside the shelter were filled with cars that citizens used to make deliveries. On Labor Day, a fight broke out between Latin American and African citizens in the Hall, over a bicycle. When the confrontation subsided, a former N. Y. P. D. A. The officer running as a firefighter pulled out a pistol and brandished it savagely at the citizens and staff. (Video of the incident was later posted online. )They called the police and the former cop told them that a resident had thrown a cone of structure at him. The resident was arrested and charged with assault, threats, disorderly conduct, harassment and incitement to riot. “Why are they taking me if he was the one who was going to shoot me?” the resident said afterward, according to City Hall. , a local news website. (The guard was later fired. Mulligan Security, which hired him, still has a contract with the city government. )
That Saturday, a scooter was stolen in front of the salon. A group of Venezuelan citizens gathered to guard their motorcycles during the night. Shortly before 3 a. m. , a Lexus pickup truck pulled up and a guy got out screaming. Venezuelans responded. The man got into his SUV, stepped on the gas pedal and ran over two of the migrants.
A week and a half later I went to the Hall. Al pass under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway overpass, spotting a group of young men and mopeds huddled together, along with a pair of crutches. bed next to a giant pile of concrete. He is in his early twenties and is slim, with black hair, dark eyes, and a tattoo of a diamond on his left cheek. His left foot was in a cast, and his purple, mutilated feet protruded from it. “The traffic above us shakes the ground. “Now I sleep here,” he says.
The guy’s name is Yoandry Jesús Lozano Bracho. After being hit by the driver of the Lexus, he was taken to Park Slope Hospital with a broken foot. (The other beaten migrant, Jhonaker Gil, suffered injuries to his arm and back. ) Lozano Bracho said he was then taken to a shelter in Queens, where doctors were on site. But everyone he knew in New York was in Brooklyn, as were two mopeds he had borrowed money for. He did not work as a delivery driver: he rented the mopeds to other people. “I asked for a loan to pay for the other one,” he explains. He left Queens on crutches, got on a bus, moved to the subway, asked other people for directions as he went, and returned to the Hall. But he was not allowed to return. So he walked down the block and lay down under the overpass. Some friends soon joined him and formed a small network with paintings outside. In addition to the bed they shared at night, they had an armchair, a few boxes of milk, blankets, and several mopeds. “They bring me things,” said Lozano Bracho about his colleagues under the viaduct. “This is how I eat. ” In just a few minutes, I saw other men bring five dollars to Lozano Bracho, ask Lozano Bracho for five dollars, and chat calmly with him, out of my reach. Accepts exchanges in kind. A guy who owes him money takes him on a moped 3 times a day to a public park, Lozano Bracho said, where he uses the bathroom.
After the accident, Lozano Bracho was forced to sell his first two mopeds, but has since acquired a third, whose income, he said, was enough to pay off his debts. To make money, he sold cigarettes and joints wholesale, with what he earned costing him about fifty dollars a day. “But every meal in this town costs ten or twelve dollars,” he said. Lozano Bracho showed me his foot and how he unwrapped and repackaged a bandage that held a corset. When I asked him how long he planned to live under the viaduct, he replied, “As long as it takes. “He looked at his foot angrily. How long will it take me to recover?She had a friend and two daughters in Venezuela, and her initials were tattooed on her right hand. “What can I send you now?” He said.
While we were talking, a friend of Lozano Bracho’s, a guy with a bath face who refused to tell me his name, stopped to pay attention. I had just returned from childbirth. I asked him about dealing with the fake account broker: did he think the rental value of the account was fair or did he feel exploited by the broker?He looked at me with pity. ” Brother, welcome to reality,” he said. “There’s nothing more to say. Whether here, in Venezuela or in Argentina. At that moment, suddenly other citizens of the camp began urging everyone, including Lozano Bracho, to stand up. ” It’s about time, guys!”one of them shouted. Several brooms appeared. Together, the men swept the cement. One of the citizens told me that they do it several times a day. Even under a road, they tried to stay clean.
Lozano Bracho said he didn’t know the guy in the Lexus that hit him. Initial news reports described the incident as motivated by racism or anti-immigrant bias. The guy accused of running over Lozano Bracho is Hamzeh Alwawi. He’s a Jordanian immigrant who owns a fast-food place called BurgerIM, six blocks from the Hall on Clinton Hill. BurgerIM, a new burger franchise that failed just before the pandemic began; Since then, its corporate ownership has been accused of luring franchised immigrants into a pyramid scheme. Alwawi now operates independently, but has retained the image of its logo. He did not deny hitting the migrants with his car, but he denied any bias. “I’m Arab, I’m Muslim and I’m black,” he said. If you want to engage in racism, you have to do it against me. “
Alwawi said that in the weeks leading up to that night, he had issues with other people running fake delivery app accounts. I knew the accounts were fake because of the identification. The photographs on the restaurant’s app interface didn’t match the faces of the workers who arrived to pick up orders. But, with the food hot and consumers waiting, he and his staff continued to place orders anyway. BurgerIM is open until weeknights and until 2 a. m. on Fridays and Saturdays, making it one of the last places to close in the neighborhood. Increasingly, at the end of the night, delivery drivers would steal orders, pick them up without confirming that they had done so on the app, and then disappear into the city. When this happened, the food had to be remade and consumers got angry. Alwawi had called the police, but without much success. “This domain has never been like this,” he said.
The night he crushed Lozano Bracho, two giant orders came in around 2 a. m. Fifteen minutes later, a delivery man dressed in a white baseball cap arrived to pick up the food. The account she ran indexed her call as Karla and her ID. A photograph of a woman. The man left the restaurant with the food in hand, but did not check the orders. Alwawi furious. He left a worker to remake the food and walked to his car, the Lexus SUV, and went to find the delivery man. “I thought, ‘I don’t need this guy to enjoy this food,'” Alwawi said. “I’m going to take the bag out of his hands and throw it away. “He walked the streets of Clinton Hill, past townhouses, pre-war apartment buildings, housing complexes, and posh wine department stores that had closed their doors for the night. After a few turns, Alwawi found himself near the Hall, a status quo he didn’t know had been there, just a few blocks away, all summer.
Outside the shelter, Alwawi said he saw the young man in a white hat in a crowd. Alwawi said he was dragged out of his car just to “talk” and then found himself outnumbered. An organization of men began pushing and beating him, Alwawi said. Then, he said, they put him back in his car and drove off. I asked him if that was when he ran over the two men with his car. “I don’t know,” Alwawi said. He returned to his restaurant and hid inside with his employee, while a group of men on mopeds piled up outside. He said they began hitting the outside of his car with the thick steel chains they used to close their mopeds. Alwawi, who had called police on his way back to the restaurant, was relieved when police arrived minutes later and was then stunned when he was arrested. (When I relayed Alwawi’s version of events to Lozano Bracho, he exploded and said, “Those are damn lies. “)
The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office charged Alwawi with attempted murder, but he was confident he would eventually be exonerated. “Don’t think I talk like that because I don’t like them,” he said of immigrants in “But the Position You Put Them Is Not Right. “
Spokespeople for the city council and RXR did not dispute that living conditions in the corridor were dire. They recalled that it was a “respite centre”, with maximum essential accommodation, intended for shorter stays. Immigrants are unaware of the other categories of emergency shelters, which ones they have been assigned to, or why. Many of the young people assigned to the corridor have lived there all summer and did not expect to be relocated.
Since this summer, another city contractor, DocGo, has faced complaints and formal investigations about situations at some of its migrant shelters upstate. Like MedRite, DocGo had landed a contract with a major city to supply migrant shelters, after operating COVID-19 testing and vaccination sites. Mayor Adams has pushed back against complaints from contractors tasked with the immigration crisis, arguing that no one else should do the work necessary to space out everyone who has arrived in the city. “We take any incidents reported in or around our locations seriously,” Adams spokeswoman Kayla Mamelak said in a statement. “But it is vital to face the truth without sugarcoating it: New York City has been facing a national humanitarian crisis for more than a year, almost entirely alone. During this time, Mayor Adams has continually warned of serious disorders that could arise and we are now watching exactly what is happening. According to an article in The City, MedRite operates about 20 emergency shelters of the more than two hundred opened by the city government since last year, while Arrow Security offers about a dozen. Residents in several other services run by the two corporations have complained of poor conditions and conflicts with guards. Mamelak declined to reveal exactly how many facilities the two corporations operate, or answer many specific questions about the Hall, adding its operating costs.
Other spokespeople for City Hall and RXR told me that the esplanade relay center was emptied in early October. Last month, renovations were completed on several other buildings on the property, which will serve as the Emergency Humanitarian Response and Relief Center, or HERRC, where more resources such as indoor showers and indoor collection spaces will be available. The total estimated capacity of the HERRC in the Hall is 3400 people, more than 4 times the number of people housed in the respite center, and 1900 beds. have already been installed. Mamelak sent me photos of the showers and rooms in the lobby with cots spaced a few feet apart instead of a few inches.
On the last day of September I made another stopover in Lozano Bracho. A historic amount of rain had fallen on New York City the day before. The viaduct was giant enough to keep as much water away from him and his friends. Lozano Bracho said, however, people, in addition to police officers, had passed by during the day and had taken the bed and other belongings. Lozano Bracho had been presented with a position at a shelter in the Bronx. “I told him, ‘No, thank you, I’m fine here,'” Lozano Bracho told me. Like other Venezuelans who lived in the room, Lozano Bracho described the shelters as chetes. “In chete, there’s a challenge every day,” he says.
For years, homeless New Yorkers and their advocates have warned that not all shelters are created equal. Well-run shelters that offer on-site facilities can provide some to others in crisis. But giant collective shelters, with little privacy and few facilities, create their own problems. Many other homeless people in New York City have already had bad reports in giant shelters. “You can’t put such evil people in an area like that and expect another outcome,” said Shams DaBaron, a former “homeless man who has become one of the leading advocates for homelessness and housing in New York,” said of the Hall. He added that the situations I described to him were not much different from those that the rest of New York City’s homeless population has endured for decades. — even if it didn’t provoke the sense of urgency generated by the migration crisis. “We’ve never had electrical outlets,” he says. We never eat the same food you do. “
In early October, attorneys representing Adams leaders called for a ruling to temporarily suspend the city’s right-to-housing laws, arguing that, when the regulations were written, no one could have expected the immigration crisis. Josh Goldfein, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society, said that if the city houses fewer people, there will simply be more people sleeping on the street. “The city deserves to help other people move so they don’t have to stay in a position like that for ‘Very Long,'” he said of the Hall. (Goldfein told me that Legal Aid took a tour of the room after it opened and that he saw staff react to combat on the premises during their short stay inside. )”Help them get a work permit,” he said. The state must help them move. The city needs to do real case control so that other people can access everything they need to get a really valid job. “
Brad Lander, New York City Comptroller, told me that situations in the city’s emergency shelters vary widely and that the city does more to create uniform criteria and identify appropriate oversight. “None of this exists either in the HERRC system, nor especially in the ‘A Separate but Unequal Housing System’ respite system for other people who recently arrived in New York. ” I hope the court upholds the right to housing, because if the court doesn’t, we’re going to end up seeing ‘Skid Rows’ in Los Angeles falling all over the world. city,” he continued. And as it gets colder and colder, the worst thing we can have is for other people to feel like their only option is to sleep on the streets. “
The day after the torrential rain, the number of people under the viaduct had increased. When I arrived, two men were shouting at each other and had to be pinned down by others. Underneath the road, there was all kinds of confusion and frustration over the closure of the respite center and where citizens had to go from now on. Many were tempted to fend for themselves on the street, so as not to have to start over in an unknown corner of the city. ” We are dying of hunger,” a Venezuelan who gave his call as Carlos David told me. David said it on his twenty-eighth birthday. He was holding a cup filled with a bright red liquid and had a hard time saying his words. He showed me his forearm, which was covered with a tattoo of the Statue of Liberty holding an assault rifle, which he said he won when he was fifteen. “I never thought I’d come to New York,” he said.
Lozano Bracho and other Venezuelans who arrived before the end of July were now eligible for Temporary Protected Status and legal residency in the United States, thanks to a statement from President Joe Biden’s administration. Recently, the administration also announced that Venezuela had agreed to begin cooperating. With the U. S. over deportations for the first time in years, as part of a series of tough immigration policies that the Axios website called “Trump. “Under the viaduct, young people felt alienated from public pressures and the closure of the migrant crisis shelter area, legal rights, political components, the long history of real estate advertising in New York City, replacement agents and creatives. The night he was hit, Lozano Bracho lost his phone and access to a federal app called CBP One. , which provides immigrants with data on eligibility for painting permits.
“The only thing I knew about Brooklyn was an old basketball jersey I had,” Lozano Bracho told me. It took him nine months to get from Maracaibo, his hometown, to the Texas border. He would run out of money and have problems along the way. In Texas, he spent weeks in a detention center before being offered a free bus ride to New York. He had a cousin in Queens who offered to host him if he came to town, but his cousin cheated him when he arrived. So he turned to shelters. He felt that what had happened in the Hall had left an indelible mark on him. He imagined how they would win him if he returned to the Roosevelt Hotel with one foot in a cast. “They might think I did something wrong and someone hit me, and that’s why I’m like this,” he said. “They won’t know. They will see me differently. Underneath the viaduct, at least he knew the faces he saw every day, and they knew him. ♦
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