NYC Nixes Migrant Shelters At 9 Hotels As Crisis Subsides
New York City is winding down contracts with commercial landlords that provided 10,000 beds to migrants and asylum seekers as they arrived over the past two years, Mayor Eric Adams announced Friday.
As many as 13 emergency shelters, including a 3,500-bed facility near the Brooklyn Navy Yard, will no longer serve as migrant shelters by the end of June, Adams said Friday in an announcement.
Adams announced 10 facilities that would be closing, pledging to reveal the three other shuttering shelters at a later date. Nine of the sites to close are in hotels that have been housing immigrants rather than tourists in recent years.
Among the hotels that will no longer be receiving taxpayer dollars to serve as shelters is The Stewart and The Watson hotels in Manhattan.
“The additional closures we are announcing today, provides yet another example of our continued progress and the success of our humanitarian efforts to care for everyone throughout our system,” Adams said in a statement.
The closures continue Adams' campaign of scaling back emergency shelters provided to house the 229,000 migrants who have arrived to the city since 2022 following his December declaration that 25 sites, including shelters on Floyd Bennet Field and Randall’s Island, would close by March.
Around 78% of those arrivals have now moved on to the next steps in their journeys, with shelter census showing populations declining for the past 27 weeks running, Adams said.
Contracts to act as migrant shelters have been a lifeline for some of NYC’s downtrodden or struggling hotels in the immediate years following the pandemic. Questions remain over the fate of the hotels that took on city contracts, including whether they will remain hotels and how they will generate enough revenues to pay off debts without the steady business from the city.
The largest shelter to close will be at 47 Hall St., a complex of warehouses that were quietly turned into a 3,500-bed shelter. RXR Realty owns the properties and has plans to convert them into a residential and retail complex.
The 99-bed Brooklyn Way Hotel at 764 4th Ave., the 74-bed Brooklyn Vybe Hotel just south of Prospect Park, the Best Western-franchised Hotel Nedia in Long Island City and the Ramada by Wyndham Yonkers just north of the city itself also will see their shelter contracts come to an end.
Also on the list: the world’s tallest Holiday Inn at 99 Washington St. in Manhattan’s Financial District, which has almost 500 beds.
Also in Manhattan, the 591-room Watson Hotel at 440 W. 57th St. in Midtown and the 618-room Stewart Hotel across from Penn Station, set to be converted to a 625-unit apartment building, will also cease to operate as migrant shelters before the end of Q2.
Roughly 16,000 hotel rooms were taken off the market to serve as migrant shelters, a temporary salve for many owners of properties struggling during the pandemic.
“It was a very conscious decision whether to take migrant demand. In a lot of cases, it was great for near-term cash flow,” Moelis & Co. Managing Director Matthew Janukowicz said at Bisnow’s New York Hotel and Hospitality Conference in April.
But tourist visits to the city are projected to reach prepandemic levels this year, according to the city’s tourism marketing arm, NYC & Co. The shelter contracts, plus a local law restricting short-term rentals like Airbnb and VRBO in the city and restrictions on new development, have combined to create a tight market allowing owners of operating rooms to raise prices to record highs.
The process of taking hotels that served as shelters and turning them back into working hospitality properties is one that market insiders will be watching closely.
“With the capital that has to go in to be able to retain the asset, I’ll be interested to see whether over the long-term that was a good financial decision or not,” Janukowicz said last year.
