New York city to close last major hotel housing immigrants

The last major hotel housing migrants in New York City, the Row NYC in Times Square, will stop operating as a shelter in the coming months, Mayor Eric Adams announced.

The mayor said Saturday that the city would not renew its lease with the Row when it expires in April, citing a continued decline in the number of migrants arriving in the city, as border crossings have plummeted to record lows.

Families living at the Row will be transferred to other facilities in the city's traditional homeless shelter system. Those shelters have recently absorbed thousands of homeless migrants as the city has continued to close shelters that once exclusively housed migrants, winding down its emergency response to the migrant crisis.

The Row, a four-star hotel on Eighth Avenue in the heart of Manhattan's theater district, became the first and largest hotel converted into a shelter as an influx of tens of thousands of migrants arriving in buses from the southern border overwhelmed city resources three years ago.

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The city entered into a $40 million contract with the hotel in October 2022 to house migrants in its 1,300 rooms, paying $190 a night per room. (Rooms reportedly ranged from $300 to $500 a night the month before the hotel opened as a shelter.)

The deal became a lifeline for the hotel, which was struggling financially and had been used to house homeless people during the pandemic under Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Row was owned most recently by Highgate and Rockpoint Group. A spokesperson for Rockpoint Group, a Boston-based real estate private equity firm, said it no longer had a stake in the hotel. Representatives for Highgate, a hospitality management company, did not respond to requests for comment.

It is unclear whether the hotel will reopen to tourists after the lease ends next year. In May, the city's tourism agency lowered its projection of foreign tourists to the city amid President Donald Trump's trade war, but the city's main attractions and hotels have shown signs of resilience this summer, with hotel occupancy rates at robust highs.

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The Row, along with the Roosevelt, became among the most visible symbols of the city's migrant crisis, which divided New Yorkers and cost the city about $7.7 billion to shelter more than 238,000 migrants over three years, according to officials.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.