New York City's Mayor, Eric Adams, is under increasing pressure as the city's migrant housing bill is set to skyrocket to an astonishing $2.3 billion.
City Hall has issued a stark warning that an estimated 14,000 hotel rooms will be required until at least the end of next year to accommodate the influx of new arrivals, pushing the total cost to a staggering $5.76 billion.
According to the Daily Mail, more than 200,000 migrants have flooded into the city since the beginning of 2022, many of whom have been transported north by Republican governors eager to distribute the burden of the southern border crisis across Democrat-led cities. Over 150 hotels are currently being utilized to house the newcomers, with the average cost per room per night standing at $352.
"The taxpayers can't pay for this indefinitely," Nicole Gelinas of the Manhattan Institute think tank told the NY Post. "We should stop using hotels as shelters by the end of the year."
These alarming figures have surfaced as the city commences its search for a contractor to secure the thousands of rooms needed for the foreseeable future. "The New York City Department of Homeless Services is seeking to continue the City Sanctuary Facility program by procuring a vendor who can assist in acquiring the use of large scale commercial hotels and hotel management services to help address the current emergency," the agency announced.
This development follows City Comptroller Brad Lander's revelation that one contractor, DocGo Inc, had billed the city $1.7 million for 9,874 vacant hotel rooms it had claimed were housing migrants during May and June last year.
The New York City Hotel Association, currently receiving $100,000 a month to manage three migrant housing contracts, has expressed its intention to apply for the new one. "We have five full-time employees specifically for fulfilling the contractual obligations, besides work done by regular HANYC staff for the contract, in addition to their normal duties," said CEO, Vijay Dandapani. "We will be filling in the request."
Several of the city's most iconic hotels, including 22 in Midtown Manhattan, have been repurposed to accommodate migrants since the onset of the crisis. The four-star Row NYC Hotel in Times Square and the Roosevelt near Grand Central are among those requisitioned, driving the average price per night paid by tourists over $300 for the first time.
Hotel executives have voiced concerns about the potential difficulties in restoring rooms currently housing migrants to a standard suitable for the millions of tourists who sustain the city's economy. "They're going to need renovations," Dandapani said earlier this year. "It's great news for construction people, but it's not such great news if you're a current hotel owner."
At the height of the crisis, tent cities emerged in Floyd Bennett Field, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, and on the grounds of Kennedy Airport, with 214 emergency shelter sites scattered across the city.
In an attempt to alleviate the strain on city finances, the Democrat Mayor scrapped the city's longstanding Right to Shelter law last year and reduced shelter stay limits to 30 days for individuals and 60 days for those with children.
However, the number of illegal migrants crossing the southern border has fallen from a peak of 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August, and city authorities have reported a consistent decrease in the number being sheltered for 14 consecutive weeks.
On Wednesday, the city announced the commencement of the dismantling of the notorious Randall's Island shelter, once the city's largest with 3,000 beds and the site of a fatal stabbing in January. "The ability to close the Randall's Island humanitarian relief center marks the latest milestone we have reached as an administration addressing this humanitarian crisis," said the Mayor's asylum seeker chief Molly Schaeffer.
The Mayor has confirmed that the shelter will close by the end of February, with the site reverting to its previous use as a public park. "We're not scrambling every day to open new shelters, we're talking about closing them," he said. "We're not talking about how much we're spending, we're talking about how much we've saved."
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