The New York Times: How Manhattan Hotels Became Refuges for Thousands of Migrants
By KAREN ZRAICK
March 23, 2023
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.”
But for months, it has been at the center of a humanitarian crisis.
It is one of about 100 hotels and other facilities, from iconic skyscrapers to humble airport motels, that the city has converted into temporary housing for some of the 50,000 migrants who have arrived on buses from the southern border since last spring. The effort may ultimately cost as much as $4 billion over the next two years and could result in cuts to city services, the mayor has warned. For migrants, the housing, while at times imperfect, has provided welcome respite as they begin to eke out new lives in a frenetic city.
And it has been something of a boon for hotels, which have suffered as the city tries to boost its economy as it emerges from the pandemic. Contracts obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests and a recent report from the office of Comptroller Brad Lander provide new insight into how hotel and even office building owners stand to profit from the conversions.
In October, the city signed a $40 million contract to buy out the 1,300-room Row until mid-April; it was the first of several Midtown hotels that now solely house migrant families. On a recent afternoon, parents and children milled about at the entrance on Eighth Avenue.
Margarita Buenaño, 43, from Ecuador, was among those outside. She is living in the Row with her 10-year-old son, and has picked up work as a house cleaner. Like thousands of others, they had trekked through the perilous Darién Gap, the jungle that connects Colombia and Panama, and kept going north until they reached Texas. Asked if the risk had been worth it, she paused.
“It’s going to be worth it,” she said. “We’re fighting for our dreams.”
A new type of shelter
The majority of shelter operations in hotels around the city are run by nonprofits contracted by the Department of Homeless Services. But a handful of the newest ones, including four in Midtown, are being run directly by the public health care system, NYC Health & Hospitals, with support from the city’s Emergency Management office and other agencies.
The nine facilities, known as Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers, or HERRCs, are more expensive to operate than normal shelters because of how quickly they had to be set up and the services they offer.
They offer on-site medical screenings, counseling and help setting up travel to other destinations. The mayor ordered their creation when he declared a state of emergency in October, arguing that the sudden arrival of so many people constituted an unprecedented crisis.
At one point, the emergency shelters included barracks-style tents set up at Randalls Island and a cruise terminal in Red Hook, closing this month. The shelters evoked protest from elected officials and advocates who said moving migrants around was “callous,” and said the city should use hotels, rather than makeshift structures in remote, flood-prone locations. Those facilities housed adult men, while families were put into hotel rooms.
From a cruise terminal to office buildings
The city has gotten creative as it tries to find space to house the migrants. It signed a $3.2 million contract in January to start using the cruise terminal with its operator, Ports America, to house migrants. The terminal will revert to its original use as the summer travel season begins.
Two new shelters are set to open in April and will take in the men who had been living in the cruise terminal, which held 1,000 cots.
One of the new shelters will be in an office building at 455 Jefferson Street, on the border of Bushwick and East Williamsburg, billed as “inspirational office space,” under a contract for roughly $360,000 a month. It is slated to have 400 cots and space for medical and legal services and a cafeteria.
Another converted office will be in Times Square, in the Candler Building, an architecturally significant skyscraper built in the early 1900s by the founder of the Coca-Cola Company. Until the pandemic, the building housed a McDonald’s. The cost of that contract has not been disclosed.
Michael Chukwuemeka, 30, a Nigerian asylum seeker living in the cruise terminal, said that he was among 250 men who would be moving to the Candler Building in the coming days. He was relieved to find out he was going to Times Square, the center of it all, a contrast with the industrial Brooklyn waterfront.
“I’m so excited,” he said as he rode the bus back to Red Hook after job-searching on Wednesday. “It’s a better place than before.”
Both the Candler Building and the Watson Hotel on West 57th Street, another emergency shelter where migrants camped out to protest being moved to the cruise terminal earlier this year, are owned by the private equity firm Yellowstone.
A web of contracts
A full accounting of the myriad costs associated with housing migrants and providing them with services has not yet been released by the city, and the hotel room rates are redacted from most publicly released contracts. But the information that has been disclosed helps explain how the price tag climbed into the billions so quickly.
Many of the hotel rooms are being paid for through a bulk contract with the Hotel Association of New York City Foundation, which signed a $237 million deal that began in September. Hotels were hard-hit during the pandemic as tourism ground to a halt; visitors are returning, but occupancy rates are still down 10 percent from 2019, according to a January report from the hospitality data firm STR.
A separate contract, to buy out the 611-room Stewart Hotel next to Madison Square Garden, listed a room rate of $200 a night for its use as a shelter. Once all the rooms are available, the monthly payment would be an estimated $3.6 million.
The contract includes requirements like daily room cleaning, fresh linens and towels once a week or as needed, and monthly exterminators.
The hotels appear to employ the same staff, though they have been joined at times by social workers, translators and National Guard members. Row is listed as a union facility on the hotel association’s site, and Rich Maroko, president of the Hotel & Gaming Trades Council, was among the officials who hailed the announcement that it would be used as a migrant shelter.
“As a union representing thousands of immigrants who provide professional hospitality to New York’s visitors, we stand ready to help in any way we can,” he said in a statement sent out by City Hall in October.
The hotel operators did not respond to requests for comment.
There are contracts with food vendors to provide meals, since the hotels generally do not have kitchens and devices like rice cookers are prohibited. An agreement with LIC COM that started in October says the company will deliver a “culturally appropriate Latin-centric menu with variety throughout the week” to the Row, the Watson and another shelter at the Hotel Wolcott. The cost was $25 to $35 per person each day.
Texas companies are key
Two of the vendors contracted to set up emergency shelters were SLSCO and Garner Environmental Services, both Texas-based disaster relief companies. SLSCO was given a contract for $135 million starting in November; Garner was given a $30 million contract.
Critics of the city’s response see irony here, since it was the Republican governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, who began busing migrants to northern cities last year to make a political statement. SLSCO also made headlines for its role building the border wall in its home state — and because the family behind it has supported Mr. Abbott, as well as Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida.
The company had previously been contracted by New York Emergency Management to construct a Covid field hospital that saw few patients, and to manage vaccination sites. An audit by Mr. Lander’s office regarding the vaccination sites last year found that double billing and errors had led to tens of thousands of dollars in overpayments.
Mayor Eric Adams has warned that the city cannot afford what he has called an “unbelievable strain,” but he has also stressed that New York will continue to welcome newcomers, many of whom are seeking asylum. Mr. Lander, the comptroller, and advocates have said the city must shift its focus to getting all homeless residents into permanent housing more quickly: Even before migrants starting arriving en masse, the average stay in the troubled shelter system was over 500 days.
Earlier this month, City Hall announced that it would establish a new Office of Asylum Seeker Operations to coordinate all of the services it is providing to migrants, and Mr. Adams boasted about his administration’s response at an event highlighting private donations for migrants.
“We go across the country, no one is doing it like New York, no one,” he said, adding, “And we’re around the clock.”