 Good afternoon everyone. I'm Ann Williams Isam and I'm the Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services. I'm joined this week at my briefing on the asylum seeker crisis by Molly Park, the Commissioner for the Department of Social Services. In my last briefing I talked about the fact that the city has reached a tipping point and about how we now have more than a hundred thousand people in our care. We have continued to respond to this tremendous need, but we also continue to make progress on moving New Yorkers out of shelter and into permanent housing. Since lifting the 90 day rule over 500 households have become eligible for our city for health vouchers. That's 500 households that would have had to wait without the elimination of that rule. I'm also proud that over this last year more people have connected to City for Heps vouchers than in any other year in history. Even as we deal with this humanitarian crisis, we are connecting a record number, nearly 15,000 households to City for Heps vouchers. Over 100,000 people in our care is a staggering number, but as we continue to respond to support asylum seekers, we are doubling down on our efforts to move people to permanent housing from our shelter system. With that, I want to share some of our latest numbers on the asylum seeker crisis and then turn it to Commissioner Molly to say a few words. As of July 9th, we have over 103,400 people in our care. That includes over 53,000 asylum seekers. More than 87,200 asylum seekers have come through our intake system since last spring. We have opened 186 sites, including humanitarian relief centers, 12 of those. Yesterday, we announced two more humanitarian relief centers. And last week, from July 3rd to July 9th, more than 3,100 new asylum seekers entered our care. As you can see from the latest data, this crisis is still very much with us. I know that sometimes people are seeing lower numbers at the border, but we here in New York City are continuing to see a steady influx of asylum seekers into the city. Let me now turn it to Commissioner Park to say a few words. Thank you. Good afternoon. I'm Molly Wasso Park, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services. I'm excited to share more about the important progress we are making, making moving New Yorkers from shelter into permanent affordable housing. We know that strengthening and expanding access to permanent affordable housing for our low-income communities is absolutely critical to addressing the city-wide challenge of homelessness. As we look to the creation of more deeply affordable housing, our agency has been laser focused on our efforts to increase permanent housing placements from shelter and doing this more effectively and quickly by cutting red tape and reducing administrative burdens for shelter residents. And when I say laser focused, I mean it. We are closely tracking progress, looking at what's working and implementing process improvements in real time. The wide range of City for Heps reforms that were announced last year are already in effect, helping even more New Yorkers get stably housed. And now, thanks to the lifting of the 90-day requirement, we are already connecting hundreds more households in shelter to City for Heps vouchers. It is very clear from the metrics that our efforts are headed in the right direction. We have seen a 17% increase in overall shelter placements year over year. We have moved 15,000 households from shelter to permanent housing in FY23 alone. And as the Deputy Mayor mentioned, we have connected a record number of New Yorkers to permanent housing using City for Heps vouchers in fiscal year 23. We are excited to continue building on all this progress, do more of what's working as we continue it to identify and address barriers to accessing permanent affordable housing for our most vulnerable New Yorkers. Because bottom line, DSS is the City's social service agency, but we're also a housing agency. DSS administers rental subsidies for more than 56,000 households, making us effectively the fourth largest housing authority in the country. DSS continues to implement bold and creative solutions to create housing opportunities for families and individuals. We are using social service dollars to increase affordable housing options through master lease contracts, piloting a housing first model to place unsheltered New Yorkers into apartments, and partnering with HPD on projects to create more deeply affordable housing for low-income New Yorkers. We are truly leaving no stone unturned. Lastly, I must take every opportunity to thank our incredible DSS DHS and provider partner frontline staff who continue to work around the clock to ensure that our agency is responding to a humanitarian crisis while effectively addressing homelessness in New York City. Thank you. Thank you Commissioner Park. As we talked about yesterday during the announcement with the Mayor on this issue, we can sometimes get lost in these numbers, but these programs are meaningful for our fellow New Yorkers and their families. Earlier this week, I actually had a powerful experience. I was out with some of the New York Federal delegation visiting the Roosevelt Hotel Arrival Center. We showed them up close what the asylum-seeker crisis means for our city, for the individuals and the families that are coming here seeking asylum, and the real stresses that we face here in New York City financially, spatially, and operationally. They said that they were proud of what they saw in terms of what New York City is doing. They said they had no idea that so many people were still coming in. They said they were amazed by the staff and the caring and the constant flow but how people are working 14 hours to get the work done. But they also said that it wasn't fair that New York City should be doing this on its own. They said that it wasn't fair that others were not stepping up as much as they could to support this work. We also asked them for their ongoing support and advocacy in Congress and I think they saw it and understood it in a different way than they had before. This is a national issue and we need a national response including financial support, expedited work authorization, and a decompression strategy. As you all know in addition to the ongoing efforts to find more locations in the city that can be used to shelter asylum seekers, there have been communities throughout New York State that have welcomed asylum seekers in their communities and really stepped up. At recent briefings we were joined by the mayors of White Plains and Albany, great examples of that spirit and that partnership. I want to give a special acknowledgement to the people of Westchester County and County Executive George Latimer for really being a model of support and inclusion and for welcoming asylum seekers as their neighbors. It is our hope that if more and more people see the success of these partnerships and see the good work that is being done that we two together can work and get more cities and more counties will really step up their efforts to provide some relief here in New York City. We are at a tipping point. Every day we are trying to make sure that we have spaces for families and children that are coming in, so many families and children, so many babies. I saw the other day at the asylum seeker center and I was saying I can imagine what that is like. We need help. We are doing the best that we can but we need additional support to make sure that the asylum seekers get what they want, which is a chance at the American Aegean, a chance to work and a chance to settle with themselves and their families. With that I'll take some questions. Data questions. So we have a total. I'm wondering if you can tell us how many people are currently in perks, how many people are in OEM respite centers and how many of those there are and how many people are outside of the city in hotels within those numbers? Sure. So we do that data once a week so Kate will get that exact numbers for you. Broken down by each. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, it's been difficult to get there but now that we have that we update them weekly so that would be great. Thank you. Also want that data. Perfect. On another note, when it was reported over the weekend that the city will stop providing free bus service for the Florida to the Roseville, can you explain a little bit why that decision was made? Are there no longer resources to do it? And then secondly, I want to ask about a tweet that Fabian put out actually about this where it used the chop, chaser, mean format. Kind of like it's indicating at least to me that maybe Fabian or the administration believes that migrants are getting more resources than they deserve. I'm just wondering if that's the message that we should take away from this week. So this is the message I want you to take away when you every time you hear me, which is that I am so proud of the fact that we have welcomed over 84,000. I'm the 84,000 asylum seekers so far into the city that we no one has slept on the street. We are giving folks the support that they need. But Chris, as you can imagine, there are difficult choices that we have to make. And since we know that the most asylum seekers that are coming into the city right now are actually not coming from buses, so that we decided to move the staff from the Port Authority over to the Roosevelt, their National Guard that are still at Port Authority. And so we know that when buses do come in, we felt like folks could make their way over to the Roosevelt. I think it's about a 15-minute walk. I've done it myself. And that once they go there, that's the work that I was talking about, where we have 1,400 people a day still coming there as we give them mental health support, getting them connected to schools, getting them connected to the support that they need. So I think that would be the message that I would want New Yorkers to take from this is that we are doing all that we can to provide those services and that we sometimes have to make some difficult choices about where those services need to be. I'm sorry, 87,200 is the amount of asylum seekers that have come into this city since last spring. But so it's about wanting to put that personnel at the most level as opposed to Port Authority. Why can't both continue that? I think we have to make difficult choices about where we're going to redirect services and supports. Could I ask the commissioner a question as well, since City of Epps have come up with a fair amount in the briefing. When the council adopted the legislation that it did recently, the mayor said that the administration believes the council does not have the legal authority to do what the reform package is proposing. What are those legal concerns? Why does the admin believe that this is somebody counseling guilty? So let me start with the very significant caveat that I'm not a lawyer and I will defer to the lawyers for the details, but DSS implements rent subsidy programs under the auspices of the state office of temporary and disability assistance. That is a very, there's a long history for that level of oversight and that was division of responsibilities that does not traditionally include the council. Maybe you said that most of the folks who are coming to New York are no longer arriving by a bus. Can you provide the breakdown so an average day X number come, Y come by a bus, meaning bus stop from wherever, and then where else are they coming from, what are those numbers? Yeah, so I don't know if I have a breakdown of that, but what we're seeing is that you remember at the beginning we'd be like we're getting eight buses a day, we're getting nine buses a day, we no longer see that and on some days we don't get any buses that are coming from South of the border. But we think that people are here, they might be in other parts of the United States, they're hearing about New York City and what they get when they come to New York City. I think even the governor said people have family that are here now or others that have come up, so that's where people are coming from, from other ports of entry and from other places and showing up at the doorstep of the Roosevelt. If I can just follow up, how have the southern border states, the folks who started doing all this, have they tapered off on sending people by bus? It is my understanding that that has slowed down a little bit and we think that a lot of the folks that we're getting now are coming from other parts of the United States where other people in other cities are running out of space, but since we have a front door that is open, people are finding themselves here. This is why it's so important for us to have a decompression strategy and to be able to send people to other parts of the state or reticket them to where they want to go because New York City can't obviously take every single person that wants to be here. With children, families with children and also how many kids are currently enrolled in schools? I think back in May the figure was something like 14,000 and also what's the city's plan going forward for dealing with children? You guys just opened up two new parks, but just families with kids and yes. Again, we'll get you the exact numbers, but we're seeing a lot of the majority of people that have been coming and you can talk to this also commissioner because every morning we're talking about what we're seeing. Families with children is by far the greatest amount that we're getting. You also know Bernadette, families with children stay the longest because it's really difficult to try to move or to find something else if you have two or three little ones. I'll get you the exact number of how many at the end of the school year were enrolled, but that's another big part of what we need to do. I know that there are many places where folks need children in their school system, but we need to make sure that we have the teachers that they need, the support that they need, the mental health support, all of those things the city has been doing. We're looking forward to the relocation plan that we have with the state where they're going to be taking some families to other parts of the state because we think that's going to be great and will provide us some relief in terms of getting families with children settled. Families with children are the ones that stay the longest. I know you guys have mentioned people going to households and having that kind of a partnership, is that something that you guys have been developing more? We'll get you more information on that. As you know, everything is on the table right now as we're seeing these numbers that are really incredible in addition to the normal summer surge that we see, so everything is on the table right now. But I didn't know if you wanted to elaborate, Commissioner, on the families with children question. Deputy Mayor, I think you said it very well that the majority of people that we're seeing most days, there's certainly variation, but most days it's families with children. We are working hard to connect them to services and ultimately to school enrollment as appropriate. We are really focused on this collaboration with the state right now to get some families resettled. So it's focused on families that have applied for asylum and actually connecting them to permanent housing outside the city. But we have a number of retail strategies that are going on. There is no one-size-fits-all solution here. Do you mean applications? We're going to come and we'll give you an update on our legal clinic that I think has been up and running. I want to say for 11 days now, and as it's moving forward, it's going well. We want to ramp it up because we really want to be able to get as many families as we can upstate. But we'll get those numbers for you. We're in office with a number of traditional shelters in development, including three on Staten Island. Why have those projects been delayed? Why have they not been set up? And what is the city doing to expedite those developments that could alleviate pressure? So there's really no such thing as an off-the-shelf shelter. Almost everything that we do, particularly in our traditional shelter pipeline, involves a fair amount of construction. That is absolutely true on the Staten Island sites as well. And construction has all kinds of unforeseen circumstances. So we're very focused on those and there will be openings coming, but there have just been some construction delays.