City officials will not be renewing a lease that converted The Row, a hotel in Times Square, into a shelter at the height of the asylum-seeker influx that saw NYC’s population of newly-arrived immigrants surge two years ago.
The exact shutdown date was not revealed for the 1,300 room hotel, but the lease that runs until next April will not be renewed, the Adams administration announced.
The Row at 700 Eighth Ave., between 44th and 45th Streets, is the final hotel in NYC being used as such a shelter. The Roosevelt Hotel on E. 45th St. and Lexington, which at its peak housed 2,900 migrants, closed back in June. The hotel has since hung out a for-sale sign.
The shutdown of The Row does not mean that the city is no longer housing homeless migrants, just that it no longer needs the large hotels that were converted to migrant shelters. The city estimates that it has spent over $7.7 billion to house 238,000 migrants since 2022.
“Three years ago, thousands of migrants and asylum seekers began streaming into our city every week — and the Adams administration stepped up,” Mayor Eric Adams said in a statement. “We opened hundreds of emergency migrant shelters to ensure no family slept on the street. Since then, we have successfully helped more than 200,000 migrants leave our shelter system and take the next step toward self-sufficiency.”
The city paid over $170 million to Boston-based Rockpoint for the right to house migrants in the hotel, back. in Oct. 2022. At the time, it was already being used as a city homeless shelter. City officials have said they are unaware what will become of the The Row now.
The migrant population surged when Texas Gov. George Abbott began busing thousands of asylum-seekers to New York. There are currently around 35,000 asylum-seekers utilizing the city’s shelter services, down from a peak of 69,000 in Jan. 2024.
New York City has a right-to-shelter mandate stemming from a clause in the New York State Constitution, which was established after a class-action lawsuit and a consent decree.
The closure of the Row in the coming months will add to a tally of 64 shelters that have closed citywide. Other high-profile migrant shelters that were located in tents, such as one on Randall’s Island and in Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn have also closed down.
The creation of hotel shelters for asylum-seekers in the Times Square neighborhood stirred a political debate about crime, as well, especiallys after one violent occurrence in particular received sustained coverage in Jan. 2024.
In that incident, a a number of young asylum-seekers–staying at both a shelter on 42nd St. and at the Roosevelt–got into a serious brawl with two NYPD officers after reportedly getting into an argument, leading to one officer’s hospitalization. Seven people were arrested in connection with the incident.
Some high-profile politicians such as (then-candidate, now President) Donald Trump used the incident to attack their political opponents’ views on immigration, the New York Times pointed out. Left-leaning advocacy groups, such as the Brennan Center, have conversely argued that there is not a meaningful statistical link between an increase in immigrant arrivals and an increase in crime rates.