Homeless prices are inn-sane
City places needy in posh hotel rooms
The city has used 30 Manhattan hotels to house the homeless, including the iconic New Yorker, the upscale Excelsior and the touristfriendly The Manhattan at Times Square.
The city’s use of Manhattan hotels shot up 58 percent in the last year as bookings expanded from the outer boroughs to prime tourist destinations in Midtown and Soho. And the homeless lodging has reached beyond fleabag flophouses to boutique hotels and brand names sought by visitors who don’t necessarily want to mingle with the down-and-out.
“We rode the elevator up to our room with homeless people who were barefoot,” one guest at the Art Deco New Yorker hotel griped on the site Trip Advisor in August.
A total of 1,453 Manhattan hotel rooms were listed on the city’s “Shelter Scorecard” for February. The citywide average per room is $222 per day, including social services. The average cost per day at a shelter is $150.
The city spent $72.9 million on hotel housing in the year ending Oct. 31, 2016, a report by Comptroller Scott Stringer says.
“This is a massive crisis, and the city is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars — per night — on hotels. They’re ill-suited to help families get back on their feet, and they’re extraordinarily costly,” Stringer told The Post.
The use of hotels for the homeless has climbed despite Mayor de Blasio’s pledge last year to end the practice after the stabbing death of a mother and her two children in a Staten Island hotel.
On Friday, a Queens toddler was found unconscious inside a Quality Inn used as a family homeless shelter. Kimio Williams was pronounced dead at Elmhurst Hospital. No arrests have been made and no criminality is suspected, authorities said.
There are now 7,500 homeless people staying in hotels throughout the city, up from 6,100 in October 2016 and 2,600 in February 2016. The total shelter population, including those in hotels, was 59,240 as of Thursday.
De Blasio’s new plan to tackle the city’s homeless crisis calls for opening 90 new shelters and expanding others during the next five years in order to get people out of hotels and “cluster site” housing by 2023.
But the plan has already hit roadblocks, with a judge last month temporarily halting the opening of a new men’s shelter in Crown Heights that is opposed by community residents.
Social services at 16 of the Manhattan hotels are provided by Children’s Community Services (CCS), a Queens nonprofit that has amassed $19.3 million in current and pending city contracts in just two years.
The nonprofit is headed by Thomas Bransky, whose bio says he used to work in his family’s Illinois hotel-management business. He loaned the organization $100,000 to get it started.
By July 2015, the group had a $1.9 million deficit, according to its financial filings. But two months later, it secured a $3 million contract to provide homeless housing in hotels, city records show. It now oversees hundreds of units.
Bransky refused to talk to The Post, directing questions to the Department of Homeless Services.
The nonprofit’s contract calls for using no more than 39 percent of a hotel’s rooms unless the city gives special permission, according to a copy obtained by The Post under a Freedom of Information Law request.
The Mave Hotel on Madison Avenue is among those in Manhattan under CCS supervision. The Post revealed in October that the city was paying for rooms there at the same time it was suing the property’s owner for operating “illegal” and dangerous rentals at Midtown apartment buildings.
The hotel had nine open FDNY and building-code violations last month, according to the Shelter Scorecard. The document says all of the hotel’s 74 rooms were in use for the homeless, although the city insisted in October it was still a commercial hotel.
The Frant Hotel on West 101st Street had the most open violations in Manhattan, with 62 last month.
The city abruptly stopped using The New Yorker in early February. A manager there would not comment.
“To address the citywide challenge of homelessness, we are ending the use of all 360 cluster sites and hotel facilities across the five boroughs. At the same time, we continue to review all our providers to ensure they meet the standards our clients deserve,” said DHS spokesman Isaac McGinn.