The Ridiculous $1.4B Cost of Migrant-Hotels Calls for Politicians to Reconsider the ‘Right to Shelter’
Jaw-dropping news that the city will shell out $1.4 billion on local hotels for migrants over three years should set off major alarms.
The public needs to see how every penny of that will be spent and to apply maximum pressure to curb costs — most notably by ending the insane, unsustainable “right to shelter” for every person in the world.
That monstrous $1.4 billion sum is meant to cover migrant rental fees at more than 100 city hotels, and doesn’t even include the cost of city-owned facilities or other sites used to house “asylum seekers.”
Yes, it’s President Joe Biden’s disastrous open-border policy, at bottom, that’s costing cities like New York billions, though the prez won’t lift a finger to help.
Still, it’s beyond insane that Gotham must pay such exorbitant sums, while contracting on an “emergency” basis — i.e., without bidding or pre-contract vetting.
Note that the city’s deal is with its main hotel association, whose 31,000-worker union was among the first to endorse Adams for mayor in 2021.
This, when long-term planning isn’t really an emergency, per se: As City Councilwoman Julie Won (D-Queens) put it, “The regular arrival of asylum seekers” is “no longer unforeseeable.”
Plus, as Nicole Gelinas notes, 10 agencies have signed 194 “emergency” contracts worth $5.1 billion for migrant services, with basically no checks and balances to control waste and fraud.
That said, the city’s perverse “right to shelter” rule is plainly the main reason New York’s per-migrant costs are far higher than other cities’.
Yet city Comptroller Brad Lander, who’s supposed to worry about the municipal bottom line, actually opposes limits on shelter stays, insisting Adams & Co. “work harder to house people before we unhouse them.”
He and the City Council ought to be joining in Adams’ bid to bring sanity to the right-to-shelter rule, not arguing for longer stays.
Hizzoner’s lawyers were in court Tuesday, trying to limit those stays and exclude migrants from the rule; not much happened as the judge wound up recusing herself.
But, as a Staten Island judge noted, in a different Tuesday case, the rule is an “anachronistic relic.” He ordered the city to stop using a former Catholic school as a 300-person migrant shelter.
Biden clearly won’t secure the border to stop the waves of illegal migrants coming to New York.
All the more reason local pols need to do everything to contain costs and keep the crisis from, as Adams warns, “destroying” the city.
