Pakistan Eyes Mixed-Use Tower for Manhattan Migrant Hub
Owner of Roosevelt Hotel taps JLL to market site as next "One Vanderbilt."
The owner of the Roosevelt Hotel, New York City’s make-shift entry point on the East Side of Manhattan for thousands of migrant asylum-seekers, has stepped forward to unveil ambitious new plans for the aging venue.
The government of Pakistan has tapped JLL as its exclusive agent to market the Roosevelt Hotel as a redevelopment site for what the New York Post is calling “a spectacular, multi-use mega-tower on the scale of One Vanderbilt.”
In June, NYC inked a $220M, three-year lease with Pakistan for the Roosevelt, converting it into a 1,025-room migrant shelter-as well as the main “intake center” for migrants entering Manhattan, who previously had been dropped off at the dilapidated Port Authority Bus Terminal.
According to the Post’s report, Peter Riguardi, CEO of JLL’s New York region, confirmed the deal to Reality Check on Friday from Islamabad, stating “Pakistan hired us to evaluate the property’s potential as a mixed-use project combining retail, offices, a new hotel, condo apartments and event space all in a single building.”
Riguardi noted that the Roosevelt, which stands between Madison and Vanderbilt avenues on East 45th Street a couple of blocks away from Grand Central Terminal, “is in the hottest part of New York City.”
Riguardi added that he expects “all the major developers, global capital sources” and “the greatest architects” to be interested in the property, the report said.
It was really hot last summer when hundreds of people ended up sleeping on the sidewalk around the Roosevelt Hotel in the triple-digit heat of a July night as the migrant surge in NYC topped 110,000 people and the capacity of the venerable East Side hotel was exceeded.
Handing out red tickets-the kind you get at amusement parks-were employees of DocGo, a city subcontractor originally hired to do Covid-19 testing, who had been awarded a $423M contract to place asylum-seekers in an alternate shelter system run by the Health + Hospitals Corporation.
When the number on the red ticket was called, the person holding it could go inside and fill out an application in the air-conditioned lobby of the Roosevelt Hotel, according to a report in The City.
In September, NYC issued a statement indicating it was “actively working to reduce housing and other costs by transitioning migrants out of the shelter system and humanitarian emergency response and relief centers to more cost-effective shelter, in addition to looking closely at other ways to reduce the costs of caring for the asylum seekers.”
On September 22, 2024, the Roosevelt Hotel will mark the 100th anniversary of its opening.