On cruise ships – Emma G. Fitzsimmons and Andy Newman in NYT:

‘As New York struggles to find housing for a wave of migrants, Mayor Eric Adams is seriously considering housing them on cruise ships — a proposal that homeless advocates have called insulting and alienating.
Mr. Adams defended the idea on Monday and said the city was looking for “creative ways” to address a “humanitarian crisis.” He said the city would make an announcement once the plans were finalized.’

(…)

‘The mayor’s chief of staff, Frank Carone, has spoken with leaders of Norwegian Cruise Line, a major cruise ship company, to discuss the possibility of housing asylum seekers on one of its ships, according to someone familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive matter. Mr. Carone stayed on one of the company’s cruise ships in Normandy, France, last month, as part of the administration’s research, the person said.
Mr. Adams grew irritated on Monday over questions about Mr. Carone’s travels and refused to answer questions about them at a news conference. A spokesman for the mayor, Maxwell Young, later added that no taxpayer money was used for the trip.’

(…)

‘At the time, the city had just begun to see an uptick in migrants. The city has said that more than 11,000 people have arrived from the border since May, many sent on buses by Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas. Although many have a place to go, the population of the city’s main shelter system has jumped by 22 percent since mid-May, to 56,000, an increase of 10,000 in four months. The shelter population grew by nearly 2,000 just in the past week.
Thousands of migrants, most of them Venezuelans, have been coaxed onto buses and planes heading to Washington, New York, Chicago and even Martha’s Vineyard after making a perilous journey to the border. Mr. Adams has publicly quarreled with Mr. Abbott, criticizing his approach as inhumane and arguing that the governor’s to coordinate with cities was making it more difficult to address their needs.’

(…)

‘Mr. Adams noted that the Bloomberg administration had considered the idea of putting homeless families on a cruise ship in 2002, when New York City’s shelter system had a smaller population of 36,000 people. The Bloomberg administration abandoned the idea after receiving criticism.
“If you think about a cruise ship, it’s exactly what you need,” Mr. Bloomberg said at the time. “Rooms with bathrooms that are safe, that we can afford, in a neighborhood we can use.” Deborah Diamant, the director of legal affairs for the Coalition for the Homeless, said that the cruise ship idea was insulting and raised concerns over providing people access to transportation, food and schools. She said it was part of a campaign by Mr. Adams, who has cleared encampments, to try to make the homeless crisis less visible.
“He’s been pushing people to the margins, and he’s been pushing people out of sight,” she said. “We’re pushing them so far here on to cruise ships — off the land and onto the water.” Ms. Diamant said she was concerned about whether cruise ships would be accessible and safe, noting that they were known as places where the coronavirus had spread quickly.’

(…)

‘A representative for Norwegian Cruise Line did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
City officials have opened 23 emergency shelters to handle the influx of migrants. But the city recently failed to offer beds to 60 migrants who arrived at the center on East 30th Street in Manhattan where homeless men are assessed when they first enter the shelter system — the first major such lapse in over a decade.
The city has previously turned to its waterways to deal with overcrowding. In 1989, when a steep increase in drug arrests filled the Rikers Island jail complex, the city used a converted British troopship as a prison barge to house inmates and docked it in the Bay Ridge neighborhood in Brooklyn.’

(…)

‘That year, Mr. Bloomberg’s commissioner of homeless services, Linda I. Gibbs, toured luxury cruise liners off the Bahamas. She said at the time that the liners could be a good option for housing homeless people, but she was concerned about the cost of converting them to meet the needs of the homeless population.
“We would have to remove bars and discos, which are inappropriate for a shelter,” she said.’

Read the article here.

In the Netherlands, a deputy minister proposed to house asylum seekers on a boat as well. It met with similar criticism and the proposal disappeared quickly.

The refugee crisis in NY, and elsewhere in the US, very much resembles the refugee crisis in the Netherlands, but people tend to believe that their own country is unique.

By the way, approximately two hundred Ukrainians are housed on a boat in the municipality of Urk, most journalists failed to notice.

A cruise ship is not by definition inappropriate housing for asylum seekers, provided that the ship is ashore and that the refugees have access to health care and all basic needs that people in a shelter might expect, maybe even more.

Also, bars and discos don’t need to be removed.