NYC Resumes Leasing Hotels for Homeless

With busloads full of migrants from the US border in Texas arriving each week in midtown Manhattan, swelling an already surging homeless population, New York City has disclosed that it is renting 11 hotels in the city for use as shelters.

The hotels being leased to the city as homeless shelters include the Marcel in Gramercy, the Apollo in Harlem and the Ellington in Morningside Heights, according to a report in City Limits.

The decision by the Mayor’s Office to rent hotel space represents a reversal for NYC, which at the beginning of 2022 had phased out commercial lodgings for homeless children following a substantial drop in the overall shelter population last year.

NYC’s Department of Social Services (DSS) told New York’s City Council last week that more than 4,000 migrants entered the city’s shelter system during the past two months, City Limits reported.

In April, as part of an escalating political dispute with the Biden Administration over federal policy regarding the flood of migrants crossing the Rio Grande, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered state immigration officials to put migrants on buses and drop them off at Washington DC’s Union Station.

This month, Abbott expanded his migrant destinations to Manhattan’s Port Authority Bus Terminal.

According to a census conducted by City Limits, the number of people in the city’s shelter system has increased from 46,591 at the beginning of the year to more than 52,000 this month; the number of families in NYC has increased to nearly 10,000, up from 8,500 on Jan. 1.

Gary Jenkins, NYC’s DSS commissioner, confirmed at last week’s hearing of the City Council’s General Welfare Committee that the increasing number of migrants coming into the city has been driving the surge at shelters.

“The uptick has been largely driven by an increasing migrant population seeking asylum,” Jenkins said.

Despite the expiration of the state’s pandemic eviction moratorium in January—and record-high rents—Jenkins noted that evictions have accounted for just 1% of the people entering NYC’s shelter system since January.

Advocates for homeless New Yorkers questioned the statistics provided by Jenkins, which also have been cited recently by Mayor Eric Adams. The Legal Aid Society and Coalition for the Homeless criticized what it called “unsupported claims that recent increases in the shelter census are due primarily to an influx of asylum seekers.”

The organizations accuse city officials of using the influx of migrants to distract from NYC’s recent failure to increase its shelter capacity in the face of NIMBT pushback. In May, the city canceled its plans for two proposed shelters in Chinatown; earlier it scrapped a proposed shelter in Morris Park.

Council member Lincoln Restler, who served as an aide to the previous mayor and worked on homelessness issue, also said he doubted the city is fully measuring the impact of the end of the evictions moratorium.

“My strong suspicion is that we are experiencing an increase in the families with children census as a result of the eviction moratorium ending and a regular spike we see in the summer months but are pointing to the immigrant community and asylum-seekers as the rationale,” he said, according to the City Limits report.

Monsignor Kevin Sullivan, who heads the NYC branch of Catholic Charities, testified that the organization recently has assisted 1,100 new immigrants from Venezuela, some of whom have entered city shelters while others “are sleeping in the parks.”