For months, Mr. Adams has raised the alarm about what he calls a humanitarian and economic crisis that the city has spent $1 billion addressing so far and that may cost as much as $4.3 billion through June 2024. Yet, at times he has embellished the impact: On Thursday, he said that half the hotels in the city were occupied by asylum seekers. City Hall officials later clarified that it was only 40 percent of a set of mostly midsize hotels, with between 51 to 200 rooms, deemed suitable to house the migrants.
Of the 150 sites being used to shelter migrants, about 140 of them are hotels where few, if any, rooms were unoccupied, the city said.
Mr. Dandapani said that because tourism in the city has not fully recovered, some hotels had decided to accept migrants as another source of revenue. In Manhattan, the hotels collect about $185 per night, he said. (The average room rate for all hotels in New York City was $297.90, STR said, the highest in the country.)
Through May 13, nearly 86 percent of New York City’s hotel rooms were occupied over the previous month, according to STR. That rate was up 8.4 percent from the same time last year and is the highest among all large markets in the United States, the group said, but was still 5 percent below the city’s rate for the same period before the pandemic.
Many of the rooms occupied by migrants have been paid for through a bulk contract with the Hotel Association of New York City Foundation, which signed a $237 million deal that started in September.
City Hall officials said that while the business may help hoteliers, the hotels that house migrants do not pay a 5.875 percent occupancy tax to the city or a 8.875 percent sales tax, as they must on rooms for tourists.
“Every day, we receive hundreds of additional asylum seekers and we are out of space,” said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for Mr. Adams. “Our city is known for its world-class hotels, and we need to ensure they can continue to service the tens of millions of tourists who visit the five boroughs each year.”