The historic Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan shuttered three years ago, but it will soon be bustling again — reopening to accommodate an anticipated influx of asylum seekers just as other New York hotels are being converted to emergency shelters.
New York Mayor Eric Adams on Saturday announced that the city would use the Roosevelt to eventually provide as many as 1,000 rooms for migrants who are expected to arrive in coming weeks because of the expiration of COVID-19 rules, known collectively as Title 42, that had allowed federal officials to turn away asylum seekers from the US border with Mexico.
Across the city, hotels like the Roosevelt that served tourists just a few years ago are being transformed into emergency shelters, many of them in prime locations within walking distance from Times Square, the World Trade Center memorial site and the Empire State Building. A legal mandate requires the city to provide shelter to anyone who needs it.
Photo: AP
However, the city is running out of room for migrants and has sought financial help from the state and federal governments, Adams said.
“New York City has now cared for more than 65,000 asylum seekers — already opening up over 140 emergency shelters and eight large-scale humanitarian relief centers in addition to this one to manage this national crisis,” the mayor said in a statement announcing the Roosevelt decision.
The storied hotel near Grand Central Terminal served as election headquarters for New York Governor Thomas Dewey, who in 1948 was said to have wrongly announced from the Roosevelt that he had defeated Harry Truman for president.
As the city faces growing pressure to expand its shelter system, it is turning to vacant hotels for those who need a roof and a place to sleep as they sort out their lives.
One of them is the Holiday Inn in Manhattan’s financial district. A few months ago, signs in the lobby windows of the 50-story, 500-room hotel said it was closed.
Scott Markowitz, partner and co-chair of bankruptcy and corporate restructuring practice at Tarter Krinsky & Drogin’s, the attorneys for the hotel’s owner, said that reopening as a city-sponsored shelter made financial sense.
“They rent out every room at the hotel at a certain price every night,” Markowitz said, adding that it is bringing “substantially more revenue” than normal operations would have brought in.
It is not new for the city to turn to hotels for New Yorkers without homes when shelters and other options are not available.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, group shelters made it difficult to comply with social distancing rules, prompting the city to rent out hundreds of hotel rooms. As the pandemic eased, the city became less reliant on hotels.
That changed as thousands of migrants began arriving by bus last year.
The Watson Hotel on West 57th Street, which used to receive rave reviews for its rooftop pool and proximity to Central Park, is now being used to house migrant families.
Hotel Association of New York City president and CEO Vijay Dandapani said the city needs to come up with long-term solutions.
“Hotels are not the solution for these situations,” he said, adding that the optics pose problems for taxpayers who might think migrants are living in luxury at their expense.
The Roosevelt Hotel is first to open this week as a welcome center providing legal and medical information and resources, officials said.
It is also to open 175 rooms for families with children, then expand the number of rooms to 850.
Another 150 other rooms would be available to other asylum seekers, the city said.
“When you offer people something like a hotel room, you’re much more likely to get a positive response to it,” Coalition for the Homeless executive director David Giffen said, adding that the rooms provide “privacy and dignity.”
However, Giffen said that hotels would not address the greater problem of a lack of affordable, permanent housing.
“What’s behind all of this [is] that we have such a failed housing system that people who have lower incomes end up using the shelter system as the de facto housing system, and then the shelter system doesn’t have enough beds so we’re using the hotels as a de facto shelter system,” he said.
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