This article was prepared for the local propublica reporting network in partnership with New York FocusA report on New York news investigation. Sign up for sending To get our stories in the mailbox every week and register New York Focus’ Bulletin here.
Hotels have long been considered the latest remedy for the shelter of the people who have lost their housing. But over the past few years, they have become a preferred reaction of New York to the homelessness outside New York, A recent New York Focus and Propublica Investigation Found.
Social services agencies across the country now have almost half of all people and families seeking asylum in hotels. However, those who are located in hotels often go without the services they should receive in the shelter, such as food, help find housing, and sometimes care for children so that they can seek work.
The increasing dependence on the hotels was caused by the growth of rent, the closure of the shelter and the thorn of the evictions that followed the moratorium during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The State Temporary Aid and Disability Assistance Office for years knew about the problem and even outlined the rules for solving the problem on its normative agenda. But the agency could not officially propose the rules or come up with a way for people to receive the services they needed.
Here are five graphs to explain our investigation.
The number of families and persons located in hotels increased twice in two years after the end of the New York eviction moratorium in 2022. Because the population in the hotels was shot, the same bill. During this period he spent up to $ 110 million on the hotel outside New York.
OTDA oversees the state -controlled counties, social services. Barbara Gin’s authorized agency said he prefers that the counties were using shelters, but there are not enough beds for anyone in need. She said the agency did not study the growth of hotels.
Despite the cost of costs, families located in hotels do not promise the same services as the people in the shelter. New York requires family shelters to provide services such as child care, housing assistance and three meals a day. But the rules usually release hotels.
There is an exception: the hotel should be considered a shelter if it “first” serves temporary housing recipients. OTDA SEECTA STR Press Socialist Farmer said the agency interpreted “first” to “mean” exclusively or almost exclusively “and that there are currently no hotels. The NEW York Focus and Propublica data analysis found that the benefits were more than half the capacity of at least 16 hotels during the 2024 financial year.
Gin said that social services offices should work within the framework of what will allow hotel owners and that the counties are trying to provide services outside.
Not only are more people in hotels, they also remain much longer. The number of families and people spending at least six months a year in hotels has almost three times increased from 2022 to 2024.
The lack of services leads to the fact that people are stuck in the system, creating a snow ball, said Steve Berg, Chief Director for the National Alliance policy to complete the homelessness.
“This is an expanding problem,” he said. “A good shelter should be focused on housing. If they do not have quite a significant effort to quickly move people back to the housing and provide the services needed for this, the shelters quickly picked up, and then they just need more shelters.”
The farmer said email that the lack of affordable housing contributes to a longer stay, and that the counties can use other financing to help people return to permanent housing.
Many hotels pay higher than rent for permanent housing.
The news organizations found that the vast majority of hotel payments exceeded the fair lease for a two -bedroom apartment in the same district. (Fair rental charges are determined by the US Ministry of Housing and Urban Development as a 40th Percentil rent plus utilities in the local housing market.) Charged rates were often more than twice.
“We are forced to rent hotel numbers across the country, and the operators of these places understand this,” said the Senator of Roxana Persian, the Democrat and the chairman of the House Social Services Committee. “The backs of municipalities are in the wall. And so they must place a insincere person or people somewhere. And you see that the cost is rapidly increasing because people understand that this is an easy way to make money from the government.”
In New Yar, Focus and Prapublica found numerous examples of families with children who live in sad and dangerous conditions. Pad, mold, broken windows and dirty linen were distributed. Some hotels have been subjected to more than one hundred emergency calls a year for attacks, robberies, mental health crises, overdose and other incidents.
Homeless -based hotels should be checked every six months in the office of the district social services. However, the data obtained from OTDA shows that many are scheduled. As of October, about 40% of the hotels were either outdated when checking them or had no listed.
OTDA’s press -secretary said that almost all hotels had been checked throughout the year and that some stopped accepting welfare recipients.
Gain, Commissioner, said that this year OTDA officially proposes the rules, clarifying that people in hotels should receive the same services as the shelter. She also said her agency would increase control over how these services provide.
