On August 21, 2023, the Mayor Eric Adams’s administration opened a migrant shelter facility on Randall’s Island. Situated directly across the East River from the New York City Housing Authority’s East River houses, the shelter lies at the end of the Ward’s Island Bridge, a footbridge that enables pedestrians from Manhattan to cross the river to the island. The expansive tent city covers at least four athletic fields. The city quickly erected the facility, known as a Humanitarian Emergency Response & Relief Center (HERRC), under Adams’s emergency declaration, first issued on October 7, 2022, and continually extended thereafter, suspending the city’s land-use review rules and procedures. The “right to shelter” decree permits single adult men aged 23 and older a one-time, 30-day shelter stay in the HERRC. Yesterday, more than a year after it opened, Mayor Adams announced that the city plans to shutter the facility at the end of February 2025.
Since the summer of 2023, the island’s relative seclusion and ample open space have enabled the city to house 3,000 migrants—primarily men from West Africa and Latin America—away from the densely populated neighborhoods of Manhattan and the Bronx on opposite banks of the East River. Despite its isolation, the shelter has faced serious and escalating issues. On July 29 of this year, a migrant woman was shot and killed on one of the island’s soccer fields at 3:30 a.m., with two others injured in the same incident. In August, a man was stabbed near the tents. Later that month, police raided the island to clear out makeshift encampments, littered with trash, that had been set up by migrants whose shelter stays had expired.
The worsening conditions on the island made the shelter’s continued existence politically controversial. Its operation also poses a significant legal issue, overlooked by both city hall and Albany. Randall’s Island, a New York City Park, features soccer and athletic fields that youth clubs and local schools use for practices and games. Now, 9.8 acres of this public parkland have been taken over by the migrant shelter, resulting in the loss of more than 10,000 permit hours for athletic and recreation activities for the city’s youth.
In New York, parkland is sacrosanct. Under the “public trust doctrine,” parkland belongs to the public and may not be “alienated” from it—that is, used for a “non-park purpose”—unless the state legislature passes a special law, signed by the governor, granting permission for the non-park use.
The doctrine is firmly established in New York State law. In the words of the state’s highest court, New York’s judiciary has “time and again reaffirmed the principle that parkland is impressed with a public trust, requiring legislative approval before it can be alienated or used for an extended period for non-park purposes.” Even the temporary taking of parkland for a non-park purpose is prohibited, absent special legislation. Another appellate court succinctly describes the rule: “Dedicated park areas in New York are impressed with a public trust and their use for other than park purposes, either for a period of years or permanently, requires the direct and specific approval of the State Legislature, plainly conferred.”
For more than a year, the city has operated a migrant shelter on parkland, and it intends to continue to do so for at least another five months. A shelter, regardless of its legitimate aims, is a non-park purpose. The shelter has rendered a large swath of Randall’s Island parkland off-limits to the purposes for which it was created—the only purposes that it is allowed legally to fulfill.
The state legislature has not enacted, and the governor has not approved, legislation authorizing the city to use the parkland for a shelter. The city council has not issued a “home rule message” to Albany requesting the adoption of alienation legislation for Randall’s Island, as it must before the legislature can act. In May, the Randall’s Island Alliance, the not-for-profit corporation that cares for the park, sent a letter to Mayor Adams expressing its frustration with the city’s illegal alienation of the parkland and calling for an “end” to the current unsustainable situation.
Nonetheless, the shelter remains in full operation. None of the elected officials representing the districts that include the island—City Councilwoman Diana Ayala, State Senator José Serrano, and Assemblyman Edward Gibbs—has made a statement about the Randall’s Island legal predicament. (Ayala recently criticized the situation on the island but skirted the question of its legality.) Governor Kathy Hochul, who must sign any legislation authorizing the city to maintain the shelter on parkland, has ignored the issue.
Nor may the city justify the shelter’s ongoing operation under the mayor’s emergency declaration (now dubiously extended for nearly two years). There is no legal principle that lets the city alienate parkland by emergency order, and certainly not when the alienation is open-ended. The power to authorize the alienation of parkland is vested solely in the legislature. To quote the New York Court of Appeals: “Only the state legislature has the power to alienate parkland (or other lands held in the public trust) for purposes other than those for which they have been designated.”
Letting the shelter run without legislative authorization not only offends a fundamental rule of New York law; it also permits our elected officials to evade responsibility for their actions. The Randall’s Island shelter has deprived citizens and their children of the ability to enjoy the parkland that the city holds in trust for them. Just because Adams, apparently desperate to trumpet political good news, has announced a projected date for the shelter’s closure does not excuse the city’s blatant violation of the public trust doctrine. If the governor, mayor, and local legislators wish to remove parkland from the public trust, let them put their names to legislation saying so, just as the law requires.
Photo by YUKI IWAMURA/AFP via Getty Images