Beleaguered New York Mayor Eric Adams has been told to get a grip as the bill for housing the city's migrants rises to $2.3 billion.
The City Council warns that 14,000 hotel rooms will be needed until at least the end of next year, by which time the total cost of supporting newcomers will reach a staggering $5.76 billion.
More than 200,000 migrants have arrived in the city since the start of 2022, many of them bused north by Republican Party governors determined to make 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 cost of $352 per room per night.
“Taxpayers can’t pay for this indefinitely,” Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute think tank told the New York Post. 'We should stop using hotels as shelters by the end of the year.'
More than 200,000 undocumented migrants have arrived in the city since the start of 2022, and the cost of supporting them will reach $5.76 billion by the end of next year.
Some of the city's most iconic hotels have been requisitioned to house the influx, including the four-star Row NYC Hotel in Times Square and the Roosevelt near Grand Central (pictured)
The numbers came as the city began searching for a contractor to 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 procuring the use of commercial hotels and large-scale hotel management services to help address the current emergency ”, announced the agency.
This came after City Controller Brad Lander revealed that a contractor, DocGo Inc, had charged the city $1.7 million for 9,874 vacant hotel rooms it claimed were housing migrants during May and June of last year.
The Hotel Association of the City of New York currently receives $100,000 a month to administer three migrant housing contracts and said it would apply for the new one.
“We have five full-time employees specifically to fulfill contractual obligations in addition to the work performed by regular HANYC staff for the contract in addition to their normal duties,” said CEO, Vijay Dandapani.
“We will be filling the order.”
Some of the city's most iconic hotels have been turned over to migrants since the start of the crisis, 22 of them in downtown Manhattan.
The four-star Row NYC Hotel in Times Square and the Roosevelt near Grand Central are among those that have been requisitioned as pressure on space has driven up average nightly prices. paid by tourists above US$300 for the first time.
And hotel bosses have warned they will have difficulty returning rooms that currently house migrants in suitable conditions for the millions of tourists who keep the economy running.
“They will need renovations,” Dandapani said earlier this year.
“It's great news for construction folks, but it's not great news if you already own a hotel.”
Tent cities sprung up at Floyd Bennett Field, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and Kennedy Airport grounds at the height of the crisis, with 214 emergency shelter sites across the city.
The city announced on Wednesday that it had begun dismantling its largest shelter, the 3,000-bed facility on Randall's Island, and that the site would close in March.
The shelter was notorious for violence and a migrant was stabbed to death there in January
Twenty-two of the hotels were in midtown Manhattan, with a total of 214 emergency shelter sites spread across the city at the height of the crisis.
The Democratic mayor abandoned the city's decades-old Right to Shelter law last year and reduced shelter stay limits to 30 days for individuals and to 60 days for those with children, in an attempt to reduce pressure on city finances.
But known crossings of undocumented migrants at the southern border fell from a peak of 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August, andcity officials said the number of people sheltered has fallen for 14 consecutive weeks.
On Wednesday, it said it had begun dismantling the notorious Randall's Island shelter that was once the city's largest, with 3,000 beds and where a migrant was stabbed to death in a fight in January.
“The ability to close the Randall Island relief center marks the latest milestone we have reached as an administration addressing this humanitarian crisis,” said House Speaker Chief Asylum Seeker Molly Schaeffer.
The mayor said the shelter will close by the end of February and the site will return to its former incarnation as a public park.
“We are not fighting every day to open new shelters, we are talking about closing them,” he added. “We're not talking about how much we're spending, we're talking about how much we're saving.”
