In Our Sanctuary City, Migrants Win, Homeless Lose

Mayor Adams’ administration has already found 1,400 hotel rooms, including some at Times Square, for migrants bused from Texas. His Honor has announced plans to seek an eye-popping 5,000 more. Yet the city’s street homeless — in desperate need of supportive housing — still face a “no vacancy” sign. Count the street homeless and those whom they menace as additional victims, along with taxpayers, of the Biden administration’s porous southern border policies.It’s been more than two years since Albany first passed the Housing Our Neighbors With Dignity Act, designed to take advantage of the pandemic-induced drop in tourism and convert empty hotel rooms to supportive housing for the street homeless. This was to be more than mere shelter; supportive housing provides treatment for mental illness and substance abuse, promising a better future for those on the street. The vision was a better, decentralized version of the now-closed state psychiatric hospital and the bare-bones single-room occupancy hotels the city has prohibited.Even after Governor Hochul signed regulatory relief legislation in June to make hotel conversions easier, not one such conversion has actually been announced. This may be, in part, because tourism has rebounded. The response to the arrival of these migrants, though, indicates something else may be going on. It also means that the Department of Homeless Services, under extreme pressure to find shelter for the newly-arrived, has become a powerful competitor of supportive housing developers who had hoped to convert hotels to long-term housing for the homeless. New York City’s law requiring it to offer shelter to the homeless forces Mr. Adams to offer shelter to these newcomers. Current street homeless, who might be attracted to the individual rooms and care that supportive housing offers, often reject moves to shelters, where chaos is common. While non-profit developers must meet high state standards and put together financially complicated plans to turn empty hotels into housing with services (latter-day versions of asylums), DHS can simply muscle them out of the picture to fulfill the short-term emergency of migrants heading to the city from the border. As one housing developer puts it: “DHS’ insatiable need for emergency shelter beds, exacerbated by the border crisis migrants being bused to NYC, certainly makes it a competitor for hotels that might otherwise be converted to housing.”The result is that the lack of serious border enforcement, or a settled immigration policy, leads to collateral damage on New York’s streets and subways. This is also a story of New York’s self-inflicted damage, based on failing to follow a time-honored maxim: don’t let the best be the enemy of the better. Instead of providing bare-bones but decent — and economically-feasible — housing for the street homeless, the Housing our Neighbors bill consigns them to the street. It needs to be revised.Simply put, it’s far easier to convert a hotel to shelter than housing; it can be more profitable and permits the owner to continue to own the property, hoping better times will return. Hosting a shelter is a short-term cash cow. A non-profit operates the hotel under city contract and pays rent every month. Converting a hotel to long-term supportive housing requires the building to be sold and reconfigured.Ms. Hochul has taken some steps in the right direction. The June 2022 legislation she signed allows hotels converted to housing to retain their hotel status, a significant cost-saver. To make use of that $200 million in Housing our Neighbors funding, developers still must provide individual kitchenettes with 24 cubic inch refrigerators, as well comply with housing codes that mandate 150-square-foot units. Many New York City hotel rooms are smaller — but the legislation allows no flexibility.Conversions that don’t use state funding could proceed more easily — to help create what one developer envisions as “21st-century single-room occupancy micro units.” For context, in 1966, when the city banned such “SROs”, there were more than 120,00 such units. Since then, there have been just 35,000 units of replacement supportive housing built. City funding could help here, so long as it doesn’t set the standards unreasonably high, like the Housing our Neighbors legislation.The Adams Administration has a chance to improve things in New York, but the wave of undocumented immigrants is doing nothing to make that difficult task any easier. City Hall has little choice, thanks to the city’s “right to shelter” law. It could, at least, track how many of the new migrants are undocumented — and pressure the Biden administration to provide funds to mitigate the problem it created.

In Our Sanctuary City, Migrants Win, Homeless Lose

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