New York City plans to move about 8,000 homeless people out of hotel rooms and back to barrack-like dormitories by the end of July so that hotels can reopen to the general public, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Wednesday.

When the pandemic lockdown began last spring, New York City took people out of the accommodations, which in some cases stayed up to 60 adults in a single room to protect them from the coronavirus. Now that social distancing restrictions are lifted and economic recovery is at stake, the city looks forward to filling these hotel rooms with tourists.

“It is time to move homeless people who have been temporarily in hotels back to shelters where they can get the support they need,” said Mr de Blasio at a morning press conference.

The mayor said the city needs state approval to remove the homeless from 60 hotels, but a spokesman for Governor Andrew M. Cuomo said the state had no objection as long as all of the shelter’s residents – including the vaccinated – masks contribute to the plan.

“The governor has lifted social distancing restrictions, so now all people need to do is follow CDC guidelines on masks,” said spokesman Rich Azzopardi.

On Tuesday, Mr. Cuomo announced that the state lifted almost all remaining coronavirus restrictions and social distancing measures after more than 70 percent of the state’s adults received at least a first dose of a vaccine.

It was unclear when the city would move forward with its plan. When asked when people would be returned to shelters, a spokesman for the city’s homelessness services agency said the agency still believes it needs state approval.

The announcement signals the beginning of the end of a form of housing popular with many homeless people, many of whom have said a private hotel room is a far better living experience than sleeping in an animal shelter. Some said they would rather live on the streets than return to group accommodation where many residents are struggling with mental illness or substance abuse, or both.

“I don’t want to go back – it’s like going back,” said Andrew Ward, 39, who stayed in a nearby men’s home at the Williams Hotel in Brownsville, Brooklyn, Wednesday afternoon. “It is not safe to go back there. They have people who bring knives. ”He said he stole his belongings at the shelter numerous times.

At the hotel he said, “It’s peaceful. It’s less stressful. “He said that if he were brought back to a collective shelter,” I would just stay on the street as before.

But the layout in the hotels, many of which are in densely populated middle- and upper-class neighborhoods in Manhattan, has created tension with neighbors who have complained about noise, outdoor drug use, and other nuisances and hazards from the hotel’s residents .

The city’s decision last year to move nearly 300 people from an animal shelter on an island off Manhattan to the Hotel Luzern on the Upper West Side triggered a month-long struggle. A state appeals court ruled earlier this month that the city can remove people from the hotel.

Updated

June 16, 2021, 8:39 p.m. ET

The mayor has said for months that the hotels were never meant to be permanent housing and that he wanted to pull people out of them as soon as it was safe. But some proponents of the homeless have found that the Federal Emergency Management Agency offered to pay for the hotel rooms by the end of September and called Wednesday’s announcement premature.

During a small protest outside the Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s residence, on Monday, the homeless and advocacy organizers Vocal-NY demanded that the homeless stay in hotels until they could be offered permanent housing.

“Why the rush to get us back to the shelters now?” said Milton Perez, 45, who spent five years in the shelter system. “Why the rush to put us in danger?”

The coronavirus has hit residents of the city’s animal shelter hard. More than 3,700 people in the city’s main housing system have contracted the virus and 102 have died from it, the city says.

During the pandemic, some shelters were completely closed for gatherings. Others moved most of the people out to make more space, but stayed open.

Proponents noted that vaccination rates for the homeless could be much lower than rates for the general population. The city said that around 6,300 homeless single adults had been fully vaccinated through homeless services websites, although it did not know how many had been vaccinated elsewhere. More than 17,000 single adults are in the main housing system.

About 65 percent of adults in New York City have received at least a first dose of a vaccine.

“There are people who sleep in shelters who still test positive and get sick,” Giselle Routhier, political director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said in a statement on Wednesday. “Until long-term affordable living space can be secured, accommodation in hotel rooms remains the safest option.”

Ms Routhier also disagreed with Mr de Blasio’s claim that people in the hotels were not receiving required social benefits. In fact, several animal shelter operators said in interviews over the past few weeks that they had found ways to offer most of the same treatment and counseling services in the hotels.

When the city decided to move people to hotel rooms last spring, many shelter operators feared many residents would fall victim to substance abuse or withdraw from social supports that were keeping their mental health from deteriorating.

Actual results are mixed. Some properties saw an increase in overdoses but a decrease in others, reporting that removing sources of tension appeared to have improved the mental health of many people, leading to fewer quarrels between residents.

We had a lot fewer incidents, ”said Andrea Kepler, the former director of a BronxWorks shelter in the Bronx that moved en masse to the OYO Times Square Hotel, where each room had a microwave and refrigerator, and housekeeping. She said that more people followed the hotel curfew because they didn’t want to lose their seats.

“When you look at it, it’s not a science,” she said. “It’s about doing really basic human things that we would all want for ourselves.”