For the second time in three days, New York City may be reconsidering its plan to temporarily house incoming migrants.
After building a tent city on Orchard Beach in the Bronx, Mayor Eric Adams announced a move to the more accessible Randall's Island.
But on Wednesday, members of the city council proposed a new approach: housing asylum seekers in shuttered hotels, which have sat boarded up and empty since the pandemic.
It's in hotels similar to those vacant ones that the New York City Council is suggesting to house thousands of asylum seeking migrants sent to New York from Texas.
"Obviously this is not the ideal situation. The city’s in a really tight predicament, we have upwards of 15,000 individuals that have come into New York City seeking asylum. We have a responsibility to shelter them," said Councilmember Diana Ayala.
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It’s an alternative to the controversial outdoor tent plan the mayor announced, which after after much objection — and fears of flooding due to rain — was moved to a new location. Deputy Speaker Ayala said that any option involving a tent is not humane.
"The locations that have been identified thus far are really just inhumane and unacceptable," she said.
The City Council says there are 10 large scale vacant hotels in Manhattan that could be converted into temporary intake centers for migrants. The hotels have anywhere from 1,025 to 478 rooms, and migrants would stay there 48-96 hours before being placed elsewhere.
"If they have specific hotels that they're talking about, I'm looking forward to sitting with the Council and Councilwoman Adrienne Adams, our speaker, and come up with those solutions," Mayor Adams said on a political talk show Wednesday night. "We have been very focused on this crisis of thousands of people arriving to our city looking for assistance, and we've responded to that and I'm looking forward to talking to them and looking at their plan that they're presenting."
When asked for a list of specific hotels, City Council did not immediately provide one to NBC New York. It would cost the city about $15 million a month to convert the hotels into intake centers, News 4 was told — which is about the same amount of money the city would be spending on the tent city.
In either possible plan, NYC would need assistance from the federal government.
