On February 24, New York mayor Eric Adams announced that the Roosevelt Hotel will wind down its migrant operations, which will cease in June. Since May 2023, the once-glitzy Roosevelt has served as the city’s central processing facility for some 173,000 migrants that arrived in New York seeking shelter. Coming on the heels of announced closures for dozens of other migrant shelters, the news signals welcome relief for New Yorkers, a potential end to the migrant crisis. But it’s only the beginning of the end.
The Roosevelt Hotel, long known as Madison Avenue’s Grande Dame for the elegance of its neoclassical lobby, crystal chandeliers, and limestone-and-marble clad exterior, once attracted celebrities and hosted political campaigns. In 2000, the Pakistani government purchased the property, maintaining it as an asset of the publicly owned Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).
In December 2020, heavy economic losses from the Covid-19 pandemic forced the hotel to shut its doors. As graffiti covered the building’s ground-level limestone and 450 union jobs hung in the balance, the city’s powerful hotel workers’ union urged the Pakistani government and elected officials to reopen the facility. Adams, who benefitted from the union’s early endorsement in 2021, vowed to repay the favor, saying on the campaign trail, “You have been my first major union endorsement, I never forget my first. You are my love.”
By May 2023, the persistent weekly arrival of thousands of migrants offered the mayor a chance to make good on his promise: a $220 million, three-year contract to convert all of the hotel’s 1,025 rooms for use as a migrant shelter, starting at a nightly rate of $202, with a minimum guaranteed income for PIA equivalent to 1.5 years of use as a migrant shelter. Dubbed the “new Ellis Island,” the Roosevelt became the venue where migrants applied for shelter placements, were screened for health hazards, located their relatives, and accessed legal aid for their asylum cases.
Now that the minimum-income period has passed, Adams has taken advantage of the contract’s early cancellation provision, which requires four months’ notice. In 2023, Pakistani reporting on the deal noted that the hotel would be returned to PIA in the same condition as before its use as a shelter. Ostensibly, the city will be on the hook for renovating the decrepit building in the months ahead. Early this year, the Pakistani government accelerated plans to sell or redevelop the hotel, perhaps knowing that the shelter contract would not last for the full three years.
The Roosevelt’s closure is possible only because the migrant crisis is abating. Since reaching a peak of 69,000 people in January 2024, the migrant-shelter population has declined steadily, currently numbering fewer than 45,000. Only about 350 migrants are entering the city each week, compared with 4,000 per week early last year. The precipitous drop has resulted from a mix of stricter border policies, begun in the waning days of the Biden presidency and toughened by President Trump, and the city’s shelter-stay limits for migrants.
By June 30 of next year, New York City also plans to eliminate the separate shelter system for migrants, folding all operations into the Department of Homeless Services. The migrant system is governed by a hodgepodge of mostly emergency contracts administered through numerous municipal agencies and the city’s public-hospital system. Though consolidation could improve operational efficiency, it will likely spell an end to the 30- and 60-day shelter-stay limits for single adults and families with children, respectively. These restrictions applied only to “new arrivals,” meaning those staying in the migrant-shelter system, not the traditional homeless-shelter system. A single, unified system may also obscure the scale of the ongoing crisis by making it harder to track the number of migrants in shelters.
Without downplaying the city’s progress, New York is still likely years away from seeing a true end to the crisis. For context, at the outset of the crisis in spring 2022, the entire homeless-shelter system—by far the nation’s largest—served about 45,000 people, roughly equal to today’s migrant-shelter population alone. The city has spent over $7 billion on migrants to date, dwarfing Chicago’s roughly $575 million. Hosting tens of thousands of migrants, potentially for years more, means that New York will continue to feel the fiscal drag of the migrant crisis.
Just last month, the Adams administration resigned a nearly billion-dollar contract with the Hotel Association of New York City that will run until June 2026 and is renewable until 2029. This one, at least, was finalized through a non-emergency, open-solicitation bidding process. Nonetheless, the hotel association and the owners it represents—supporters of Adams’s 2021 and reelection campaigns—have profited handsomely from the migrant crisis.
Though he has repeatedly emphasized the need for greater governmental flexibility in handling the migrant influx, Adams never directly challenged the series of consent decrees—now dating back 44 years—that constitute the right to shelter. New York City’s unique guarantee of immediate shelter on demand will thus persist, with no structured improvement to govern similar emergencies that may arise in the future.
In time, the migrant crisis will provide history with a textbook example of how New York handled a catastrophe the New York way—with lavish spending, political dealmaking, and no plan for a lasting solution.
Top Photo by Selcuk Acar/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images