In a tidy suburban apartment complex on Long Island, a Venezuelan mother of two surveyed her new home and declared herself blessed.
Sury Saray Espine and her family had spent 13 months in a homeless shelter in New York City. Now, in early February, they were moving into a one-bedroom in Central Islip with a galley kitchen and access to a swimming pool.
Best of all, the state would pay their rent for a year, through a resettlement program designed to house 1,250 migrant families at a fraction of the cost of keeping them in New York City’s overflowing shelters.
The family’s experience, however, has been an anomaly.
The state’s Migrant Relocation Assistance Program has failed to live up to expectations, moving only 174 households into permanent homes outside New York City since it began last July.
“Man, do I wish that program was working better,” Jackie Bray, the state emergency services commissioner, said in November. “That program is not at this point succeeding. And that’s a huge disappointment to us.”
By contrast, the state of Illinois, which launched a comparable program in December 2022, says it has moved 4,697 households into apartments — 27 times as many as New York.
The New York program differs in many ways from Illinois’s: New York limits participation to families with children who have filed for asylum and are on track for work authorization. It aims to move migrants outside of New York City, whereas the Illinois program — which has since been curtailed — lets migrants resettle in Chicago. It remains unclear what will happen once that program’s shorter-term subsidy expires.
New York’s program was intended to chip away at the migrant shelter population that stands at about 65,000 people, including 15,000 families, as the crisis approaches its two-year anniversary. The influx is a product of increased border crossings, paralysis in Washington and New York’s unique rule requiring it to offer a bed to every homeless person.
But several factors are keeping the program from shifting into high gear, according to state and city officials and the local nonprofits that try to match migrants with apartments.
Many migrants do not want to leave the city. Many suburban and rural counties are unwilling to take them in. Across the state, there is a shortage of affordable housing. And for the program to work, rents must be low enough that when the state stops paying, the family can shoulder the burden.
Officials in the administration of Mayor Eric Adams of New York City have voiced impatience over the slow rollout.
“The state should think innovatively about, if this doesn’t seem like it’s working, what’s next?” Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom said in January. “Like, you can’t just say, ‘My Plan A doesn’t work and so I’m throwing my hands up.’ What’s Plan B and what’s Plan C?”
The state says it has tried to make the program more appealing to both migrants and landlords, who might reasonably worry about whether tenants will be able to pay rent once the subsidy ends. New York is offering landlords bonuses of up to $15,000. And it has made marketing videos selling distant counties to migrants.
The program remains hampered in other ways. Dozens of local governments issued executive orders aimed at blocking the city from moving migrants to their communities. City officials urged Gov. Kathy Hochul to override those orders, but she has resisted.
As a result, the state is resettling migrants in only five of its 62 counties: Albany, Erie, Monroe, Suffolk and Westchester.
Two of those counties, Suffolk and Westchester, have some of the state’s most expensive real estate. Because they’re near the city, they are also among the counties migrants prefer.
Many migrants don’t want to leave the city because of under-the-table jobs they can commute to without cars, or because their children have started school there. Of 1,800 families the city has found eligible for the program, only about 700 said they would relocate, state officials said.
In Suffolk County, where Ms. Espine’s family now lives, the typical rent is $2,100 for a one-bedroom apartment and $2,500 for one with two bedrooms.
For Ms. Espine, 26, whose room in a shelter at a Manhattan hotel was furnished with a microwave, a mini-fridge, a table and a chair, the move to Central Islip unfolded like a dream.
“Can you take a video of me?” she asked the leasing agent as she put her key in the lock. The agent showed her how to turn on the stove, the oven, the air-conditioner, the heating.
“Sebastian, watch your sister,” Ms. Espine told her 7-year-old son. But he was too busy playing hide-and-seek in one of the closets, a grin on his face. Soon he was rolling on the grass outside.
Ms. Espine video-called her family in Venezuela. “Look at this, Tía!” she said as she showed them the kitchen. On the other end, her relatives wept. Stability, Ms. Espine said, “is something primordial.”
“To come from where we have come from, and to be here,” she marveled. “For some people this may be a small apartment, but for me this is huge.”
Martha Maffei, executive director of SEPA Mujer, the nonprofit that runs the relocation program in Suffolk County, said that finding apartments had been a struggle. As of mid-February, SEPA Mujer had placed just 19 households.
“We’ve had some experience building relationships with landlords,” she said, “but it’s difficult because of how expensive it is.”
Matt Tice, the director of asylum seeker programs at the Jericho Road Community Health Center in Buffalo, said that the pace of migrant resettling had begun to pick up, and that placing families has been easier than expected.
“We’ve been really encouraged about how open landlords have been,” he said.
Part of the battle, he said, was to convince families that Buffalo, a city of nearly 300,000, offered similar opportunities to New York City.
“I had a family just tell a case worker yesterday, ‘I don’t know if I want to go to a place as rural as Buffalo,’” Mr. Tice said. “I would never consider Buffalo rural.”
As extravagant as it may sound to offer families a year of free rent in a decent apartment, the program has the potential to save the government money.
New York City is paying an average of nearly $400 per night to shelter each migrant household. So keeping 1,250 families in shelters for a year costs at least $180 million.
The $25 million budget for the resettlement program works out to about $55 per night for each family.
The program works like this: The city shelter system looks for qualified families who are willing to move. It then notifies the state, which has hired local nonprofits to find landlords willing to rent to the family. If a match is made, the family moves in.
For the first year, the nonprofits make sure the families have what they need to survive and become self-sufficient. That can include connecting them to food, doctors and schools, as well as offering job training, English instruction and rides to interviews.
“You must accept any job offered to you that you are able to do,” says a document the state gives to participating families.
This was fine with Ms. Espine’s husband, Jhon Freddy Hernández Aparicio, 25.
“I’ll do anything,” said Mr. Aparicio, who worked in a pastry shop in Venezuela. “It could be delivery, construction, dishwashing, whatever.”
In Westchester County, Carola Otero Bracco, the executive director of Neighbors Link, said her organization had placed 40 migrant families.
Landlords, she said, “know that this immigrant community is going to work hard to meet its obligations and they may end up having tenants for the next 25 years.”
Ms. Bracco said she did not expect the requirement of steady employment to be an obstacle. “There is absolutely a thirst and a need for this work force,” she said, in jobs including construction, health care and domestic work.
One recent arrival to Westchester is Najib Arsalan, 37, an engineer from Afghanistan who fled the Taliban and with his family undertook a journey of biblical dimensions.
They walked for 40 days through mountains and deserts to reach Turkey, enduring nights so cold they burned extra clothes to stay warm.
They received visas to go to Brazil and lived at an airport in São Paulo, then in a refugee camp in the jungle. After crossing the U.S. border, they lived in a shelter in New York City for six months, and through the relocation program, got an apartment this year in Ossining.
While waiting for his work permit, Mr. Arsalan volunteered with groups that help migrants resettle. Recently, he started a job as a geotechnical engineer.
“I don’t have any words to express my feeling of how lucky we are,” he said.
