For thousands of homeless New Yorkers, a life-changing silver lining in the pandemic is quickly coming to an end: They will no longer be staying in city hotels.

In about six weeks, the homeless department will vacate more than 60 commercial hotels that were used as emergency shelters for about 9,000 people during the COVID-19 crisis.

This means that more than a thousand people are sent back to dormitories, also known as “meeting shelters,” where residents sleep several people in one room each week. Meanwhile, it is unclear how many homeless people in the city have been vaccinated.

“You make yourself comfortable in a place [then] you are elsewhere. They have to readjust, ”said Mike Roberts, who was forced to move from a hotel on the Upper West Side to Kenton Hall, a men’s home on the Bowery, on Monday. “It’s very, very depressing.”

Roberts, originally from Atlanta, has been homeless in New York for about two years. For the past four months, he has lived in the Lucerne hotel, which last year became a lightning rod for some locals to raise the mood against the homeless.

Living at the hotel allowed Roberts to focus on recovering from drug use, participating in a local job program, and putting together his paperwork to apply for permanent housing, he said.

Mayor Bill de Blasio has repeatedly said that the hotel accommodations as temporary solution. But that has made the big change in lifestyle for the people, for only those Having a private room and shower have has transformed.

“People will be about to do things and get to the goal that they want to achieve. All of a sudden: transfer. And you have to deal with whole new people you don’t even know, ”said Roberts.

‘Like at home’

Joseph Humphrey boarded a converted school bus on Monday morning, surrounded by cameras and reporters. He has been living in Lucerne since last summer, he said, when the hotel on West 79th Street first attracted the anger of his neighbors, then many … Media attention.

“It was like being at home,” he said from a tinted window of the bus.

Nearby members of the UWS Open Streets volunteer group – which has used for the residents Last year – distributed “Know Your Rights” leaflets to men who emigrated and offered help with paperwork to get special health shelter for a private animal shelter room.

On site, members of the Open Hearts group had written messages with colored chalk: “Housing is a human right,” it said in one. “Love your neighbor,” advised another.

Little by little, residents came down the Lucerne stairs, dragged their duffel bags and got on the bus.

Joseph Humphrey speaks from a bus that is taking him from the Lucerne hotel to an animal shelter in Lower Manhattan, June 28, 2021. Ben Fractenberg / THE CITY

Humphry was also on his way to downtown Kenton Hall.

“Who knows how long I’ll be there. I have a housing package, ”he said, referring to the necessary permits to secure subsidized housing. “But I still don’t have an apartment.”

The bus drove off in the middle of a sentence.

“I’ll be fine!” Humphrey screamed. “Hasta la vista!”

Booked up

According to a source with knowledge of the plan, the move from Lucerne is part of “wave 2” of the DHS transfer operation, with a new group or wave of hotels being cleared every week.

Eight hotels – all in Midtown, the Upper West Side or the Upper East Side – will be evacuated from their nearly 1,500 residents this week.

In addition to Lucerne, these include: OYO Times Square at W. 47th St .; Times Square Hotel on W 46th St .; the Comfort Inn on W. 44th St .; Four points on W. 40th St .; the Kixby Hotel on W. 35th St .; The Blakely at W. 55th St. and The Bentley at E. 62nd St.

Opponents of the plan to evict people from vacant hotel rooms blamed racism and a pervasive “Not In My Backyard” (NIMBY) mood.

“The pattern of movements is very clear,” said Helen Strom, an attorney with the Safety Net Project, an advocacy group for the homeless and low-income New Yorkers. “The city starts with almost exclusively hotels in Manhattan, mostly in Midtown, in white and affluent areas.”

Assistant public attorney Delsenia Glover, a longtime housing rights activist, said of the moves, “NIMBYism wins.”

“This city does not value the people unless they have money or status or political influence,” she said on Monday in front of the Lucerne.

Deputy Public Housing Attorney Delsenia Glover hugs Corinne Low from the Upper West Side Open Hearts group when homeless men were forced to leave the Lucerne hotel on June 28, 2021.

Deputy Public Housing Attorney Delsenia Glover hugs Corinne Low from the Upper West Side Open Hearts group when homeless men were forced to leave the Lucerne hotel on June 28, 2021. Ben Fractenberg / THE CITY

Lawyers have also previously indicated that the federal government has announced it will pay them Hotel rooms until September. However, these payments do not cover any accommodation programs, services, or staff.

Isaac McGinn, a DHS spokesman, said the agency expects to complete all hotel moves “by around the end of July.”

In a statement, he applauded shelter, vendor and homeless workers for their work “under unprecedented circumstances” to “relocate thousands of people from shelters to commercial hotels to give them the same protection from the virus as those who are lucky had been able to distance themselves socially at home in this crisis. “

“Now that the health indicators are pointing in the right direction,” and the state has issued new guidelines for the operation of gathering shelters, he said, “We’re putting this temporary program off and returning to shelters as we did during the pandemic have announced. ”

Bad environment

Although it’s a disruption, Roberts is still making his move from Lucerne – because he’s “got too far” to stop now, he said. But he knows that there will be men who will disappear from the radar after the transfer.

“It can get people back on the streets,” he said.

Life in Lucerne is easier, less crowded and it was “fun to come back,” he said.

“Once you get to the accommodations, you only live in the dorm with 20 people, one person talks all night because they’re crazy and people might get high. That’s not how you want to live, ”he added.

Strom has heard the same thing from many customers in more than a dozen animal shelters who have got used to having “basic privacy, personal space and the ability to close a door”, among other things.

“People are more likely to take to the streets than go back to a collective shelter,” she said. “This is how bad this environment is for people.”

Many are “excited and concerned” about returning to collective accommodation, mainly because more contagious COVID-19 variants spread in New York.

“We speak to people with really serious health problems, underlying health conditions and disabilities – conditions that put them at risk of serious illness or death and COVID,” Strom said.

No vaccinations

The Homeless Services Agency does not track vaccination rates among residents of the shelters. However, the data suggests that homeless New Yorkers were vaccinated much less often than the general public.

As of June 21, the latest available data, approximately 6,500 residents had been vaccinated through DHS services.

This is from 5,000 in early May, reported the New York Post, but represents a fraction of the total population of the shelter system, which was 47,114 as of Monday, DHS records show.

How many people out of this total were vaccinated outside of the efforts of the DHS is unknown.

Strom said the majority of the homeless New Yorkers she speaks to are unvaccinated, including “people with really serious health problems” who aren’t sure how the vaccine will affect them, she said.

Roberts has not yet had the injection himself and says he doesn’t believe in “taking medication for such things” and that he feels “perfectly fine”.

Still, he worries about the fate of the shelter residents as a whole.

“Governor Cuomo said 70% of people are vaccinated, right? But if people haven’t been vaccinated I’m pretty sure they will be homeless people, ”he said. “That means that they endanger people.”

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