New York’s beleaguered Mayor Eric Adams has been told to take action as the city’s migrant housing bill soars toward $2.3 billion.
City Hall warns that 14,000 hotel rooms will be needed until at least the end of next year, when the total cost of caring for the newcomers will reach as much as $5.76 billion.
More than 200,000 migrants have arrived in the city since early 2022, many bused north by GOP governors determined to have Democratic cities share the burden of the crisis at the southern border.
And more than 150 hotels are still being used to accommodate the influx, at an average price of $352 per room per night.
“Taxpayers cannot afford this indefinitely,” Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute think tank told the paper. NYPost. “We must stop using hotels as accommodations by the end of the year.”
More than 200,000 undocumented migrants have arrived in the city since early 2022, and the cost of caring for them will reach $5.76 billion by the end of next year
Some of the city’s most iconic hotels have been requisitioned to accommodate the influx, including the four-star Row NYC Hotel in Times Square and the Roosevelt near Grand Central (pictured)
The figures emerged as the city began looking for a contractor to ensure it could secure the thousands of rooms needed in the future.
“The New York City Department of Homeless Services is seeking to continue the City Sanctuary Facility Program by engaging a vendor that can assist in acquiring the use of large-scale commercial hotels and hotel management services to address the current emergency,” announced the agency.
It came after City Comptroller Brad Lander revealed that a contractor, DocGo Inc, billed the city $1.7 million for 9,874 vacant hotel rooms that he claimed housed migrants in May and June last year.
The New York City Hotel Association is currently paid $100,000 a month to manage three migrant housing contracts and said it would reapply.
“We have five full-time employees who are specifically fulfilling the contractual obligations, in addition to the work done by the regular HANYC staff on the contract, in addition to their normal duties,” said CEO Vijay Dandapani.
‘We are going to fulfill the request.’
Some of the city’s most iconic hotels have been turned over to migrants since the crisis began, including 22 in Midtown Manhattan.
The four-star Row NYC Hotel in Times Square and the Roosevelt at Grand Central are among the hotels that have been requisitioned as space pressures pushed the average nightly price paid by first-time tourists above $300.
And hotel bosses have warned they will struggle to return the rooms currently housing migrants to a good condition for the millions of tourists who keep the economy going.
“They will need renovations,” Dandapani said earlier this year.
“It’s great news for people in construction, but not so great news if you’re a current hotel owner.”
At the height of the crisis, tent cities sprang up at Floyd Bennett Field, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and on the grounds of Kennedy Airport with 214 emergency shelters across the city.
The city announced Wednesday that it had begun dismantling its largest shelter, the 3,000-bed facility on Randall’s Island, and would close the site in March.
The reception center was notorious for violence and a migrant was stabbed to death there in January
Twenty-two of the hotels were in downtown Manhattan, with a total of 214 emergency shelters across the city at the height of the crisis
The Democratic mayor last year abandoned the city’s decades-old right-to-shelter law and lowered shelter-in-place limits to 30 days for individuals and to 60 days for people with children. reduce the pressure on city finances.
But the number of known border crossings by undocumented migrants at the southern border has fallen from a peak of 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August.According to authorities, shelter numbers have now fallen for 14 weeks in a row.
On Wednesday, it said it had begun dismantling the notorious shelter on Randall’s Island, which was once the city’s largest with 3,000 beds and where a migrant was stabbed to death during a fight in January.
“The ability to close the Randall’s Island Humanitarian Center marks the latest milestone we have achieved as a government in addressing this humanitarian crisis,” said Molly Schaeffer, the mayor’s chief of asylum seekers.
The mayor said the shelter will close at the end of February and the site will return to its former form as a public park.
“Every day we are not talking about opening new shelters, we are talking about closing them,” he added. “We’re not talking about how much we spend, we’re talking about how much we’ve saved.”