Nearly every city agency, even the arts, had to pitch in on migrants

The $12 billion migrant crisis has touched nearly every facet of municipal government over the past year — with the city even tapping the arts to pitch in, City Hall’s annual report card shows.

As officials raced to respond to the thousands of unexpected waves of arrivals who had to rely on the Big Apple for housing and other services, the shelter costs were into the stratosphere and led to a surge in applications for the Big Apple’s municipal IDNYC cards, according to the sprawling 520-page report, released late Friday.

The city was so desperate for help that it even enlisted the arm of the mayor’s Materials for the Arts office, which is dedicated to financing museums and other institutions, to distribute clothes at shelters, according to the report that summarized the city’s services during fiscal 2023.

“This year, on top of housing teaching artists, MFTA served as a crucial resource for asylum seekers, providing desperately needed clothing and supplies to shelters,” wrote the Department of Cultural Affairs in its section of the annual report.

The number of families depending on the scandal-scarred Department of Homeless Services for shelter jumped by 50 percent last year — increasing from 8,500 families to more than 12,700.

During the reporting period, which ran from July 2022 to June 2023, the overall number of people in DHS shelters increased to 66,195 from 45,563 the year before.

“Without the new asylum seeker population, the overall census would have been approximately 10 percent higher than just prior to the beginning of the asylum seeker influx in April 2022,” DHS wrote.

The cost of renting all the hotel rooms played out in the MMR too as the average expense for sheltering a family with children in 2023 leaped to $232.40, up from $188.20 in 2022.

The strain put on the shelter system showed up in other ways: The number of requests for interpreters nearly doubled in just one year from 47,504 to 84,020.

The Human Resources Administration, the city’s social service arm, reported that the percentage of New Yorkers successfully diverted from entering the shelter system fell slightly from 8.1% to 7.6% because of the influx of migrants, who are eligible for fewer services.

Meanwhile, applications for the Big Apple’s ID program, created to provide a form of identification for anyone without a driver’s license regardless of immigration status, jumped by 14 percent, from 168,000 in 2022 to 192,000 in 2023.