Enough is enough!
The Big Apple’s migrant crisis is spiraling so far out of control that fed-up businesses say they’re taking a financial hit as the chaotic influx of asylum seekers pouring into the city spills out of city-run mega shelters and onto the streets.
From families sprawled out on busy Midtown sidewalks, grown men brawling and even mini tent cities popping up – frustrated New Yorkers say the asylum seeker mess has now well and truly become a plague that’s showing no signs of easing.
Over the last month alone, The Post has documented asylum seekers lounging back in camp chairs on the sidewalk outside the massive Roosevelt Hotel shelter in Midtown as they sat down to eat and smoke in the sunshine.
Migrant kids have also been spotted playing outside businesses and riding their scooters up and down 46th Street – dodging pedestrians along the way.
“It has really, really, really affected us,” a distressed George Boahene, who is the manager of SAYKI Menswear, told The Post. “This is not a residential area; this is a business area.”
The situation outside the suit store, which operates on the ground level of the Roosevelt, has escalated so much that Boahene now fears he’ll lose his job if something isn’t done to curb the migrant crisis.
“I am scared a little bit because this is not the way it’s supposed to be,” he said of the current state of business. On a normal Friday, Boahene claimed the store would usually have “5,000 customers or orders” – but it has dwindled to “less than 500.”
“And I’m scared because if my boss sees the situation, that business is not going up, he’s going to close the store. And then I don’t have a job,” he said.
Boahene added: “It’s really affecting Manhattan.”
In scenes reminiscent of an open-air market, men and women staying at the Roosevelt shelter – which is also the city’s main intake site — have been pounding the pavement hawking anything from t-shirts, jeans and shoes to coffee and snacks to fellow migrants and passersby.
“It’s a f–king eyesore. You have to zigzag, do a little dance sometimes to get past there without bumping into anybody,” a 46-year-old finance worker raged as he commuted home.
“I’m not saying don’t put them somewhere, but here in this neighborhood where they’re turning the place into a dump? They can stay inside, they can go to the park, but you don’t own the sidewalk, you don’t take it over. It’s too much.”
Dozens of motorcycles and bikes now also line the entire block outside the Roosevelt and the nearby Row Hotel mega shelter, with asylum seekers delivering food to earn cash amid lengthy delays in work permits being granted.
Large groups of men have been spotted in recent weeks crowding around their bikes, often spilling out onto the street, as they await delivery slots.
“It’s very bad. It’s terrible. It’s a bad image for business,” the owner of a jewelry store near the Roosevelt said of the growing crowds. “People don’t want to come around here, and I don’t blame them.”
“In the morning, it’s messy – cans, food, everything. We have to clean it up. They sit in front of the entrance and I have to ask them to move. They park their scooters and bicycles in front of our business. They don’t care.”
He added: “I have no choice but to live with it.”
The Post witnessed nearly a dozen illegal e-bikes being seized by the NYPD from outside the Row shelter late Sunday, angering many of the asylum seekers outside.
Up near Central Park, the accumulation of bikes outside the shuttered jail-turned-migrant shelter at 31 Central Park North has also become an eye-sore and a source of major complaints for residents.
“I’ve called 311 on the bikes and scooters, and the police cleared them out, but today they are right back here,” said Rachel Luna of the conditions outside the Lincoln Correctional Facility in Harlem.
Things took a violent turn at the same shelter Sunday morning when a group of “disorderly” migrants hurled at passersby before beating up two men who tried to intervene, according to police and witnesses. One local who intervened, a 35-year-old man, was hospitalized after the migrants shoved him through a glass door of an apartment building entrance.
Meanwhile, conditions outside the city’s latest mega-shelter at 47 Hall Street in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill neighborhood – just steps from where a mini tent encampment was erected last week — are just as dire, residents and local business employees say.
Migrants staying at the shelter, which is designed to cater to roughly 2,000 single adults, have taken to hanging their laundry on steel barricades erected along the sidewalk, milling about on the streets and smoking in a nearby children’s playground.
“The vibe has shifted,” an employee at an adjacent motorcycle store said.
“There are a few hundred migrants just loitering around, sleeping in the courtyards, leaving their garbage all around the store and in the courtyard. They hang their clothes outside. It makes the place looks untidy and unwelcoming.”
The employee added: “We have had to hire a separate security guard to prevent [migrants] from coming in the store or loitering outside … It’s clear our sales have been affected. Not only are we losing business, we also have to spend extra money on third-party security.”
Some asylum seekers, who were recently booted from the shelter for fighting, opted to set up a mini tent encampment under the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Their makeshift shelter was promptly torn down by city workers last Friday – only for the migrants to return the following day.
Mayor Eric Adams insisted as recently as Monday that he wouldn’t allow the Big Apple to become like other major cities with tent encampments popping up everywhere, saying: “We’re not having that here in New York.”
“I told everyone last year, ‘This migrant crisis is going to come to a neighborhood near you.’ That day has arrived. It’s going to come to everyone’s neighborhood,” the mayor warned as he doubled down on previous cries for federal aid in dealing with the mounting crisis.
“People need to focus their attention to Washington, DC. A national problem should be a national solution. It should not be New York City’s solution,” Adams said.
City Council Minority Leader Joe Borelli (R-Staten Island), however, lashed out at Adams for pushing the Big Apple as a sanctuary city in the first place.
“The problem is those who demand we continue to be a sanctuary city have to plan other than to spend us into gross deficits,” Borelli told The Post.
“They don’t have an effing plan other than that, period. We simply have to stop paying. We have to stop signing leases with hotels, we have to stop building HERRCs! Enough is enough.”
City Councilman Ari Kagan (R-Brooklyn) also weighed in, arguing the current situation wasn’t sustainable.
“We can no longer accept every day more and more people. We will not be able to handle it ourselves. We don’t see the end of it,” Kagan said.
“The idea was not that New York City accepts everybody, 1000s a day, into the city. We don’t have capacity to accept all these people.”
Additional reporting by Khristina Narizhnaya