New York City is converting the world’s tallest Holiday Inn hotel into the Big Apple’s sixth mega-shelter for its surging migrant population, Mayor Eric Adams announced Tuesday.
The deal will supply 492 rooms for adult families and single women, Adams said in a statement.
“With more than 44,000 asylum seekers arriving in the last 10 months alone, we have helped provide shelter and support to nearly as many asylum seekers as the number of New Yorkers we already had in our shelter system when we first came into office,” he said.
Terms of the contract weren’t announced, but The Post reported last month that the owner of the 50-story hotel in Manhattan’s Financial District had an agreement in place to charge NYC Health + Hospitals a nightly rate of $190 per room.
At full capacity, that would amount to $93,500 a day, or an estimated $10.5 billion through May 1, 2024.
Details of the pact were contained in court documents tied to bankruptcy proceedings involving the hotel, owned by Chinese developer Jubao Xie, which is saddled with debts that include $11 million in interest on loans.
The Holiday Inn Manhattan Financial District went bust in November after business dried up during the COVID-19 pandemic and it was only getting an average daily rate of $102 per room in January, according to court papers.
The city already operates large, emergency shelters — which it calls “Humanitarian Response and Relief Centers,” or HERRCs — in four other Manhattan hotels.
It also recently opened a controversial shelter for adult male migrants at the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal in Red Hook.
More than 50 migrants refused to relocate to that shelter last week, sparking a four-day protest outside the three-star Watson Hotel in Hell’s Kitchen, where they’d previously been housed.
The standoff — which Adams said was fueled by activist “agitators” — ended Wednesday when cops broke up an encampment being maintained by about 25 remaining diehards.