Beleaguered New York Mayor Eric Adams has been told to get a grip as the bill for housing the city’s migrants soars towards $2.3 billion.
City Hall is warning that 14,000 hotel rooms will be needed until at least the end of next year when the total cost of providing for the new arrivals will reach a staggering $5.76 billion.
More than 200,000 migrants have arrived in the city since the start of 2022, many bussed north by GOP governors determined to make Democrat cities share the burden of the crisis on the southern border.
And more than 150 hotels are still being used to house the influx at an average cost of $352 a room each night.
‘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.’
The figures emerged as the City began looking for a contractor to ensure it secured the thousands of rooms needed going forward.
‘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.
It came after City Comptroller Brad Lander revealed 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 is currently paid $100,000 a month to manage three migrant housing contracts and said it would 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.’
Some of the city’s most iconic hotels have been turned over to migrants since the start of the crisis, 22 of them in Midtown Manhattan.
The four-star Row NYC Hotel in Times Square and the Roosevelt near Grand Central are among those that have been requisitioned as the pressure on space drove the average price per night paid by tourists over $300 for the first time.
And hotel bosses have warned that they will struggle to return rooms currently housing migrants in a fit state for the millions of tourists who keep the economy afloat.
‘They’re going to need renovations,’ said 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.’
Tent cities sprung up in Floyd Bennett Field, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and on the grounds of Kennedy Airport at the peak of the crisis with 214 emergency shelter sites in the city.
The Democrat Mayor abandoned the city’s decades-old Right to Shelter law last year and cut shelter stay limits to 30 days for individuals and to 60 days for those with children, in a bid to reduce the strain on the city finances.
But known crossings by undocumented migrants at the southern border have dropped from a peak of 250,000 in December to 58,000 in August, and city authorities said the number being sheltered has now fallen for 14 weeks in a row.
On Wednesday it said it had begun dismantling the notorious Randall’s Island shelter which was once the city’s biggest with 3,000 beds and where one migrant was stabbed to death in a fight 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 said that the shelter will close by the end of February and the site will return to its former incarnation as a public park.
‘We’re not scrambling every day to open new shelters, we’re talking about closing them,’ he added. ‘We’re not talking about how much we’re spending, we’re talking about how much we’ve saved.’