NYC Has Been Putting Up Homeless People at Fancy Hotels for $400K Per Night

MIDTOWN MANHATTAN, NY — When Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to open 15,000 rooms for homeless New Yorkers by 2030, few figured he'd begin with exorbitantly priced hotel rooms in Midtown Manhattan.

How exorbitantly priced? Here's the math, according to a humiliating report issued Wednesday by City Comptroller Scott Stringer:

• The city is currently blowing through $400,000 — per night — to rent commercial hotel rooms for almost 6,000 homeless people.

• That's a 670 percent increase in just 12 months.

• The rooms have cost taxpayers $73 million over the past year.

• The most expensive rooms — 60 of them — went for $629 per night.

• The average cost per room, per night has risen 20 percent from last year, to nearly $200.

The comptroller is calling the Department of Homeless Services' hotel bill under its current commissioner, Steven Banks, "unprecedented."

"These costs are absolutely alarming," Stringer said. "While I know that progress will take time, we cannot continue to accept the status quo."

On two particularly lavish nights in September, a Department of Homeless Services (DHS) employee used a city credit card to purchase $629 rooms for each of 30 homeless families at a hotel near Times Square, the report showed.

A source within DHS who spoke to Patch, but who wished to remain anonymous, tried to explain away that $38,000 charge by saying the hotel owner "increased the rates during the UN General Assembly."

(We asked spokespeople for both the DHS and the Mayor's Office why they couldn't have found a cheaper hotel in a less insane part of the city while the UN was in town. We didn't get a response from either.)

And the Times Square hotel wasn't exactly an outlier.

Stringer's report also showed that homeless people have stayed in $400-per-night rooms at two particular Midtown hotels more than 800 times on the city's dime in the past year.

A hotel in Bushwick, Brooklyn, normally marketed to moneyed hipsters was renting out 44 rooms to DHS-placed homeless people as of last spring, according to local news reports. Rooms at the hotel reportedly rent for $200 to $500 per night.

The homeless count in NYC has been ballooning for years — a direct effect of the city's out-of-control housing market.

There are now around 60,500 homeless people living within city bounds, up from 37,500 in 2011.

Ask a homeless person sleeping on an NYC sidewalk or park bench why they don't stay at a homeless shelter, even through the city's dripping-hot summers and bone-chilling winters, and you'll often be told: The street, however uncomfortable, is still a better home than most of the city's shelters.

Among the "deplorable" conditions at public shelters, according to a previous report from the city comptroller: Bugs. Rats. Mold. Gas leaks. Holes in the walls. Leaky roofs. Broken windows. Zero security.

“There’s absolutely no excuse for any of this," Stringer said last year.

"We may not be able to solve homelessness overnight," he said, "but we can damn well fix leaky roofs and repair broken doors."

Hotels-as-shelters are also not ideal. They offer "limited services to help homeless individuals get back on their feet," according to Stringer, and almost never provide any kitchen facilities or childcare services. Families are often housed far from their kids' schools.

Safety is an issue, too. Last February, Rebecca Cutler, a homeless mom from East Flatbush, Brooklyn, who had been living with her three children in a Staten Island hotel with no security, was stabbed to death — along with two of her little girls — by an ex-boyfriend. Only her little boy survived.

In the aftermath of the horrific triple murder, de Blasio promised that the city's goal going forward would be to "utilize hotels less and less and, as quickly as possible, to stop using hotels. That is our goal."

Nearly a year later, there's no evidence de Blasio — or Banks, the mayor's appointed head of homeless services — have made any progress on this front, according to Stringer.

Aja Worthy-Davis, a spokesperson for the mayor, told Patch on Wednesday: "There’s no doubt that hotels are not ideal for homeless New Yorkers." However, the mayor's flack said, "until we get citywide acceptance that more shelters are needed, hotels remain the only short-term option for keeping many New Yorkers off the streets."

DHS has apparently given up on alternate options. Correspondence made public by Stringer on Wednesday showed that — for the first time in city history — the only emergency cash DHS is requesting this winter to ease the homeless crisis is earmarked "exclusively" for hotel beds.

Banks now wants to add around 4,000 more hotel spots, costing the city another $218 million — a figure the comptroller called "astronomical" and "unprecedented."

"The high cost of commercial hotels is all the more alarming," Stringer wrote in a stern letter to Banks, "considering that we are spending these funds on the least appropriate rooms with the fewest services in the shelter system."

The comptroller has demanded DHS come up with a strategy by Dec. 23 for phasing out its reliance on the NYC hotel industry.

Lead photo by East Midtown/Flickr