One in five New York City hotels are now repurposed to house illegal immigrants. This fact raises many questions. How much is this costing taxpayers? What do the rooms look like after a third-worlder has lived there for a year? Why was there so much space available? Will any self-respecting tourist ever stay in one of these properties when (if?) they return to proper hotel status?
Let's address the non-rhetorical questions.
...relocation, relocation, relocation. Where in the city are all of these displaced humans? Three areas stand out: Midtown Manhattan, Long Island City, and Jamaica, Queens. There is no ideal place to put someone who should, by law, be in jail.
That said, there is hardly a worse place imaginable to house thousands of illegals than Times Square. One day, Javier is frying plantains and taking his burro to market. The next, he's riding on the back of a moped under flashing, 7-story LED screens. His new friend Pablo from the gang El Tren de Aragua is driving: they're looking for tourists to rob.
Such is the reality for thousands of military-aged men in the streets of the biggest, most densely packed city in the country. It's not much better in Long Island City, the sub-borough undergoing an industrial-to-residential transition. Nor is the answer to push the unwanted into Jamaica and the Bronx.
The "why" part is the easiest to answer. The hotel sector has been slow to recover following Covid. Room rentals were down 75% in the early stages of lockdown, but they still lag pre-pandemic norms by 11%. So an offer to fill a hotel with enough "migrants" to reach and sustain full occupancy is hard to refuse. Especially if they can charge more for illegals, as Bloomberg reported in 2023:
The Holiday Inn in Manhattan’s Financial District has had a tough few years, shutting twice during the pandemic and struggling with too much debt. In November, owner Jubao Xie put the 50-story hotel, the world's tallest Holiday Inn, into bankruptcy. Just weeks later, New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s administration came with a lifeline: It wanted to rent all 492 rooms to house roughly 15,000 migrants over the next 15 months. The hotel, typically charging $110 a night, would get 73% more, or $190 a room. Plus, the city would guarantee full occupancy at a time when it expected to be just 70% full.
The cost of this crisis, manufactured out of whole cloth by the Biden administration? For NYC taxpayers, the number is $10 million per day. While citizens bear the brunt, they aren't the only ones. With 20% of hotels occupied by an invasive force, rooms are more scarce, lifting the cost of an average night's stay to $301.61 in 2023, up 8.5 percent from $277.92 in 2022.
So tourists take a bath, as well as locals. Illegals take a bath as well, but in a tub, in a free room, in one of the most expensive cities in the country.
