Living in New York City is not cheap, but it is supposed to be glamorous. If you look at realtor.com, you can find a 500 or 600 square foot apartment for about $2500 a month. Then on top of that you pay city, state, and federal income tax. It’s a pretty pricey place to live. At those prices, you expect a few benefits. Many buildings have doormen. You are close to restaurants and entertainment. Central Park is beautiful. The museums are great. But New York City is changing. Crime is up. The homeless population is up. Many areas of the city are simply not appealing because of changes in the law that make peeing in the street not a crime. One partial answer to this is a return to the ‘broken windows’ policy of Rudy Giuliani. Unfortunately Mayor De Blasio is heading in the other direction.
The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article on Friday reporting the following:
Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday revealed a plan to buy properties around the city and turn them into permanent affordable housing, after moving more than 10,000 homeless people into hotels during the COVID-19 pandemic and shaming rich residents who have left the city as ‘fair weather friends’.
At a press conference on Friday, he did not say which type of buildings the city had its eye on and the city is refusing to give more details, citing ‘privacy concerns’.
De Blasio only said there was an ‘opportunity to get creative’ now when it came to finding housing for New York’s homeless.
It presents a stark scenario for landlords or building owners who may be struggling to collect rent from current tenants, many of whom – both commercial and residential – have absconded.
The homeless-in-hotels scheme set up by de Blasio is one of many components to an escalating downward change in the city.
Before the Mayor gets too wrapped up in the homeless-in-hotels idea, he might want to look at a recent Fox News article detailing a similar program in San Francisco.
The article at Fox News notes:
Police arrested two adults accused of operating a low level meth lab at a San Francisco hotel designated as a safe shelter for people on quarantine, at risk for COVID-19, or without housing.
The call came in about a strong chemical odor coming from a hotel room and officers responded to the Civic Center Motor Inn about 2:30 p.m. on Saturday.
The U.K. Daily Mail also notes:
Many of New York’s wealthy residents fled months ago – taking their disposable income and their tax dollars with them – and there are fears they may never come back.
Crime is on the up but de Blasio has stripped the police force of $1billion in response to Black Lives Matter protests.
Some retailers and restaurants have been forced to close permanently and those who are hanging on face continuously changing and difficult rules, like having to sell ‘substantial’ amounts of food to customers to avoid crowds gathering.
De Blasio and Cuomo are enforcing checkpoints to stop tourists from 35 COVID hotspot states from entering the city without quarantining for 14 days too.
Earlier this year, it emerged that 139 struggling hotels are taking in homeless people to avoid deathly COVID-19 breakouts in shelters. The effort is being mostly paid for by FEMA, but 25 percent of it is coming from the city’s shrinking budget. It brings some cash to the struggling hotels which were decimated by the pandemic.
Through the program, they take $175 per person, per night which – with more than 13,000 homeless currently being housed in hotels – is more than $2.275million, according to anonymous city sources who have been quoted since May.
Please follow the link to the article at the U.K; Daily Mail for further details on the Mayor’s idea.
I suspect in the very near future, you will be able to buy a condo or rent an apartment in New York City at bargain-basement prices.