Relocation

A City record that moves people, or an institution, from one place to another on the City’s schedule: detention to be moved from Rikers, a closure, an order to vacate. The term names the administrative act.

Read “relocation” on GLOSSARY.

Shelters

  • The Bruckner Boulevard emergency shelter, to close by the end of calendar year 2026.

The Bruckner Boulevard shelter is the last emergency shelter the City runs for asylum seekers outside its Department of Social Services and Department of Homeless Services system.1 In February 2026 it housed about 1,950 people.

On 19 February 2026 the City published a plan under Emergency Executive Order 2. It sets the shelter’s closure for the end of 2026 and states that its residents will be moved into facilities run by the Department of Social Services and the Department of Homeless Services.2

Asylum seekers currently living at the Bruckner Boulevard shelter in the South Bronx will be required to relocate to other Department of Social Services (DSS) and Department of Homeless Services (DHS) city shelters across New York City.

Housing

  • 345 Cypress Avenue, vacate order 259462: the entire building, 41 units, fire damageeffective 29 April 2025 · no rescission recordedVacate orders
  • 327 Concord Avenue: emergency declaration EGNCY 17526, 29 March 2023; the building came down before the demolition was signed offon 27 November 2023 · no record of where the households wentThe building was demolished under an emergency declaration.DURATION, case one

Institutions

  • Rikers Island: the Department of Correction is to stop housing people there by 31 August 2027, when the island passes to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services (Administrative Code § 4-215(a)(1)). The four borough jails approved in 2019 are to replace it; the Bronx one is scheduled to be finished in the second quarter of 2031.Administrative Code § 4-215(a)(1), added by Local Law 16 of 2021 · City Planning Commission, September 2019 · Department of Design and Construction, Phase 1 construction scheduleSCHEDULED
  • Lincoln Hospital, on this block from 1898 to 1976, as a 2019 land use filing gives itNo City record dates the closing itself.Lincoln Hospital stood on this block.DURATION, case two

Rikers Island

Under Administrative Code § 4-215(a)(1) the City must stop detaining people on Rikers Island by August 31, 2027, when the island passes to the Department of Citywide Administrative Services. The four borough-based jails are its replacement. The Department of Correction held 6,614 people in custody on September 21, 2026, by its own Daily Inmates In Custody record, a count that excludes sealed cases.

Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn

A federal jail run by the Bureau of Prisons on the Sunset Park waterfront, outside the City's plan to close Rikers. From January 27 to February 3, 2019, after an electrical fire, the West Building was without power in freezing weather. Certifying a class in Scott v. United States (Eastern District of New York, 19-cv-1075), the court described “a series of inhumane and potentially dangerous conditions that affected residents throughout the West Building during the week without power.” The United States later offered settlements to about 1,600 people held there, and 965 accepted, for about $7.55 million. The Bureau of Prisons held 1,317 people at the facility on October 15, 2026, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s own detention statistics give it an average daily population of about 25.5 for the 2025 fiscal year.

Horizon Juvenile Center, 560 Brook Avenue, 1998–

The City’s Department of Juvenile Justice opened Horizon Juvenile Center on January 18, 1998, as secure detention for young people with cases pending. Its counterpart, Crossroads Juvenile Center, opened that August at 17 Bristol Street in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The Administration for Children’s Services runs both today. Horizon is in Community District 1, a few blocks outside the study area.

The facility is rated for 123 individual rooms. ACS has held more than that under a waiver from the State Office of Children and Family Services, which is resubmitted every sixty days; the waiver of February 2025 raised the ceiling to 154. At the monitoring team’s visit in July 2025 Horizon held 154 young people and could not give 33 of them a room, and those thirty-three slept on portable bunks in classrooms and dayrooms (Monitor’s Seventh Report on the Conditions of Confinement for 16- and 17-Year-Old Adolescent Offenders at the Horizon Juvenile Center, Dkt. 926, November 7, 2025, pages 15 and 30).

In April 2025 the State Comptroller reported that between 2019 and 2023 ACS had not reported 37 per cent of incidents at the two centers to the State, and that contraband cases had risen from 62 to 706 (Office of the State Comptroller, Oversight of Horizon and Crossroads Juvenile Centers, April 10, 2025).

The expansion is in design, in three phases: an exercise pavilion of 31,000 square feet, an annex of 75,000 square feet with 48 bedrooms and eight special-needs beds, and 17,325 square feet of at-grade recreation and horticulture (Capital Projects Dashboard, Department of Design and Construction project 4358, reporting period May 2026). Those 48 and eight are the 56 additional beds the Council Finance Division gives in its report on the Fiscal 2027 Preliminary Plan, which expects completion by the end of calendar year 2028 (page 10); the dashboard has forecast April 30, 2029 since May 2024. The capital plan carries $371.1 million in City funds for the project (Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, September Capital Commitment Plan Fiscal Year 2027, volume 1, page 78).

The conceptual design presented to the Public Design Commission on May 20, 2024 gives as its drivers “changing perceptions by adopting a new visual language and differentiating from the current punitive architecture” and “warm, dignified and generously sized living quarters that closely resemble regular apartments, schools or a campus setting.”

Vacate orders

A vacate order requires the occupants of a building, or part of one, to go, and not return until it is rescinded.3 It can be issued by the Department of Buildings or by Housing Preservation and Development. It is served on the building.

It has no expiry. There is no review date and no requirement that anyone come back to it. It ends when it is rescinded, and if nobody rescinds it, it does not end.

That is what a temporary designation looks like when nothing in the record closes it. The instrument did what it was built to do — it removed people from a building that was found unsafe. What it was not built to do is end, and no part of it requires anyone to notice.