The mayor’s claim that hotels must release rooms to tourists is controversial by the industry itself.
“For many hotels it is imperative that this program continue,” said Vijay Dandapani, president of the Hotel Association of New York City, last week. Even if you count homeless people, the occupancy rate is low, and the lack of demand has caused room prices in public hotels to fall.
But the hotels, many of them, were concentrated in the Manhattan neighborhoods of Hell kitchen and Chelsea, have attracted the opposition in the community since the program began. Local residents complain that hotel guests use drugs, hang around, steal in shops and harass passers-by.
A hotel, the Lucerne on the Upper West Side, just a few blocks from Central Park, became the theme months of political struggle in a bastion of liberalism after nearly 200 men, many of whom struggled with drug problems, were moved there.
Some residents greeted the men. Many failed to do so and spoke out loudly against the city, which tried to relocate them to a hotel in another affluent area of downtown just to surrender a lawsuit there.
Last week the men were moved from the hotel and back to emergency shelters.
One of them, Mike Roberts, 36, offered a posting from his new home in the East Village on Sunday.
He sleeps in a room with seven or eight cubicles, each with three or four men. If he reaches over from his bed, he can touch the next one.
Unlike his room in Lucerne, the animal shelter has no air conditioning. Mr Roberts often wakes up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat and cannot go for a walk because if he leaves the shelter between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., he loses his bed. Of course, his room does not have its own shower or television either.
“Here, when I wake up, I’ll be in a cubicle,” he said. “There will be three people around me sleeping, one snoring, one likely getting high, or some guy walking up and down the floor. Who wants that?”
