(ConservativeSense.com) – New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced on Tuesday that the world’s tallest Holiday Inn located in Manhattan’s Financial District will be converted into the city’s sixth mega-shelter for migrants.
In Adams’ statement, he noted that 44,000 migrants have arrived in NYC over the last 10 months and that the city has “helped provide shelter and support to nearly as many asylum seekers as the number of New Yorkers we already had in our shelter system” since Adams took office.
The latest hotel deal will provide 492 rooms for migrants, specifically for families and single women. Although the contract terms are not officially announced yet, it was reported in January that the 50-story tower’s owner had an agreement to charge a nightly rate of $190 a room to NYC Health + Hospitals. That would be roughly $10 billion over the next year if the rooms are filled to capacity.
The hotel is owned by a Chinese businessman named Jubao Xie, who is apparently facing bankruptcy after business dried up over the pandemic lockdowns, leaving the developer in massive debts, including $11 million in loan interest.
Although being paid by the city to house migrants may save Xie, the city itself is struggling to deal with the situation. Recently, a few migrants and activists camped out in front of the Watson Hotel after the single male asylum seekers being housed there were ordered to move to a new mega-shelter in Brooklyn to make room for incoming migrant families.
In response, Adams spent the coldest night of the season at the Brooklyn shelter in a PR stunt to show the conditions there were acceptable. Just last month, Adams also visited the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, to assess the situation. He tried to disabuse migrants of the fantasy that NYC streets are paved in gold and that everyone could be taken care of there, and called the situation at the border a “national crisis.”
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