The mayor has little help or sympathy from Albany or Washington

Bankshot: Mayor Adams responded to the overdue end of the national pandemic state of emergency that had let the federal government use Title 42 to suppress the number of migrants arriving in America by declaring a new local state of emergency allowing New York City to violate its unique and largely court-created right to shelter in anticipation of even more migrants arriving now.

Straight chaser: While attention is being paid, for good reason, to the 40,000 newly arrived asylum seekers presently sleeping in our severely strained shelter system, there’s been much less said about the news that Gotham’s population has shrunk by nearly half a million people or more than 5% between April of 2020 and June of 2022, according to new U.S. Census data.

The population of college-educated New Yorkers alone declined by more than 100,000 in 2021, according to a New York Times analysis, way up from an already unprecedented net loss of 70,000 degree-holders in 2020 as the pandemic dramatically accelerated the existing trend of people with options leaving a city where the cost of living is, indeed, preposterous.

While Manhattan has started growing again, along with the rents there, the other four boroughs have all been shrinking.

Meantime, the sustained decline that began pre-COVID and was accelerated by it in the number of children served by the city’s public schools and thus in the funding going to those schools has been paused, for now, by an estimated 14,000 migrant kids enrolling this year — straining schools without staff to accommodate such an influx of English-as-a-new-language learners.

That’s happening in a system that, as Reema Amin reported at the education news site Chalkbeat, has been under a state corrective action plan since 2016 for failing to support English learners or provide legally required services to those with disabilities.

It was obvious during the pandemic, as New York largely shut down while its government and services chugged along atop an incredible wave of tens of billions in federal aid, that a reckoning was coming even as Mayor Bill de Blasio and the politicians vying to replace him including Eric Adams mostly whistled past that graveyard.

Perversely, that tsunami of aid was an unintended gift from a little-missed former New Yorker as President Donald Trump’s refusal to accept his election loss cost his party Georgia’s Senate runoff races, giving Democrats full control of elected Washington.

Now, that money is nearly spent and that reckoning is here ahead of schedule along with these migrants and the multi-billion-dollar bill to house and help them.

All that as Manhattan office occupancy has plateaued at just above 50%, a big, likely permanent blow to the city’s tax base that will take years to be fully absorbed as leases expire, balloon mortgage payments come due, some buildings undergo expensive residential conversions, and zoning and other rules slowly catch up to new realities.

There’s no support coming this time from Washington, where President Biden is facing his own difficult immigration politics and has simply ignored the ever-more urgent pleas and demands of Mayor Adams.

I’m so old I remember Adams declaring himself the new “face of the Democratic Party” after his 2021 election and him being expected to serve a key surrogate in the 2024 presidential election back before he was being conspicuously ignored by centrists like Biden and Gov. Hochul who see no need to make his unsolvable problem their own while lawmakers to the mayor’s left criticize City Hall’s efforts in a “the food is lousy and the portions are too small” fashion.

That said, Adams has often seemed like he’s responded to previous bad press cycles by making new unforced errors while complaining publicly and privately about the supposed “total disrespect” he says his efforts are being received with.

For example, it would have made a lot of sense to put up tents this spring, when the weather is much more favorable, than it was when those went up and then down weeks later last fall, rather than abruptly requisitioning elementary school gyms as “respite centers” before reversing course days later.

Bottom line: New York is faced with an immediate, and expensive, crisis in providing for the migrants arriving here, and as the cost of doing that competes with the cost of providing for New Yorkers who’d already been here.

At the same time, New York is faced with a long-term challenge to maintain the riches it has and the services those provide for as the centripetal forces that propelled its explosive growth in the 20th century appear to be overmatched by centrifugal forces portending a poorer and smaller city as the 21st century unfolds.

Siegel ([email protected]) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.