(C) Wisconsin Watch
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Why N.Y.C. Hotel Rooms Are So Expensive Right Now [1]
['Luis Ferré-Sadurní']
Date: 2024-05-25
In late 2022, as thousands of migrants began to arrive in New York City, city officials scrambled to find places to house them. They quickly found takers: hotels that were still struggling to recover from the pandemic-driven downturn in tourism.
Dozens of hotels, from once-grand facilities to more modest establishments, closed to tourists and began exclusively sheltering migrants, striking multimillion-dollar deals with the city. The humanitarian crisis became the hotel industry’s unexpected lifeline in New York; the hotels became a safe haven for tens of thousands of asylum seekers.
Two years in, as the city’s peak tourism season is about to begin, the migrant crisis has helped dramatically shift the hotel landscape in New York. The conversion of hotels to shelters has sharply decreased the supply of rooms just as tourist demand has risen, nearly to prepandemic levels, and is projected to match a record high.
The migrant shelters — along with other factors that include inflation, the loss of Airbnb short-term rentals and an expected decline in new hotel construction — have propelled the nightly cost of an average room to record levels.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/nyregion/hotels-prices-migrants-nyc.html
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