The health of the city’s hotel industry is a crazy-quilt pattern of mostly optimistic but confusing and conflicting cross-currents. Large new hotels continue to open even as famous old ones close for good. Occupancy’s way up over 2021 but still below pre-Covid times.

Just steps from Times Square and surrounded by Broadway theaters, the Row NYC hotel advertises itself as “more New York than New York,” bringing together “urban grit with grandeur.”

After escaping political persecution in Zulia, Venezuela, José Rivera arrived in a hotel-turned-shelter in Long Island City, Queens, last August. Once there, it took him three months to learn he and his family, as asylum seekers in NYC, were eligible for health insurance and another three months to file his asylum claim.

Three years after the pandemic, companies and administrations around the world continue to try to attract employees back to the offices and revive local economies. New job data analyzed by Bloomberg News shows that, in several US cities, Fridays at the office are dead. Mondays are a game of chance. And going back to pre-pandemic work hours seems like a lost cause.

New York City is bustling with office workers again, at least on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. It’s a different mood on Fridays and Mondays, when subway cars empty out, Sweetgreen salad lines thin and, come happy hour, there are plenty of seats at the bar. The in-person workweek has shrunk to three days.

Buried in the bewildering data dump that is the city’s tentative property assessment are nuggets of interest to real estate.

City & State NY: Fifty Over Fifty January 30,

After plummeting in 2020, tourism is forecasted to return to near pre-pandemic levels this year.