Queens is taking the largest share of migrants into emergency shelters set up by the city — fueling what the borough’s president on Thursday called a “powder keg” of crises and creating a “recipe for a social and economic disaster.”
Queens was housing 4,782 migrants, or 32% of the total 14,777 placed in emergency shelters as of Wednesday, according to data compiled by the Department of Homeless Services and obtained by The Post on Thursday.
That share is more than one-sixth greater than the 27.3% that Queens residents contribute to the city’s total population, according to 2020 census data.
“It’s a powder keg in Queens at this point,” said Queens Borough President Donovan Richards.
He said the migrants were being sent even though “there’s not enough resources being pumped into the communities.”
“There are several crises. You have a recession coming. We have a lack of affordable housing, rising rents. We have food insecurity.
“This is a recipe for a social and economic disaster,” he warned.
Richardson specifically cited “not enough bilingual teachers and not enough bilingual mental health counselors — even in Queens,” which is known as “The World’s Borough” because nearly half the 2.4 million residents were born abroad.
“It’s beyond ridiculous,” he emphasized.
The DHS figures show that The Bronx and Manhattan have also taken in more than their fair shares of migrants, based on their percentages of the city’s total population, while Brooklyn — which accounts for 31.3% of the city’s population — is housing just 26% of the migrants.
On Staten Island, where migrants have outraged residents and pols by begging near hotels in the Travis neighborhood, the number more than doubled during the past week, surging to 495 from 252 on Oct. 5,
That pushed borough’s share to 4% of the total and has it closing in on the 5.6% that Staten Island accounts for in terms of the Big Apple’s population of 8.2 million people.
On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams warned that migrants would be housed in “every community” in the city and said residents wouldn’t be alerted ahead of time.
“As the emergency comes, we have to make these on-the-ground moves and make sure that we deal with the crisis that’s in front of us,” he said.
