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New York City has agreed to lease the Roosevelt Hotel for three years to use the century-old Midtown property as a shelter for asylum-seekers.
Mayor Eric Adams' administration is paying $220M to the hotel’s owner, state-run Pakistan International Airlines Corp., to occupy the more than 1,000 rooms, Bloomberg reports. The hotel is now being used as the city’s central intake center for all arriving asylum-seekers, Adams announced in May.
The deal will provide a much-needed funding boost to Pakistan, which has seen its foreign exchange reserves plummet to their lowest level since 2014.
The iconic hotel opened in 1924 and was slated for closure in 2020 because of the impact of the pandemic. The city’s hotel industry was hit hard by the loss of tourists, but numbers have been steadily improving since the worst of the crisis. New York is expecting 63 million visitors to come to the city in 2023, 95% of pre-pandemic tourism levels.
Adams said in May that New York has so far cared for 65,000 asylum-seekers and has already opened 140 shelters. On Monday, the mayor announced houses of worship will be taking in migrants in a deal arranged to help ease the burden on the hotels.
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