NYC politicians call for moratorium on transferring homeless out of hotels
The city should impose a 90-day moratorium on moving around homeless people currently housed in hotels, says a group of Council members.
The call came Thursday as the city was planning to move 240 homeless individuals out of the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side to another location following a local outcry.
“Uprooting these shelter residents from their homes, however temporary they may be, is not only unjust during a pandemic, it is an alarming threat to public health,” Democratic Council members Stephen Levin (Brooklyn), Mark Levine (Manhattan), Carlina Rivera (Manhattan) and Helen Rosenthal (Manhattan) wrote Mayor de Blasio and two of his commissioners.
They said the proposed new location for the Lucerne residents, a Radisson in the Financial District, “is a less favorable location due to the lack of supplementary recreational space ... and the move has no clear genesis in consistent policy.”
The moratorium would provide exceptions for cases in which residents are put in single hotel rooms and for requests made by homeless individuals.
“When transfers resume, we ask that they be inclusive of the residents and their needs in accordance with clearly articulated principles of overall homelessness policy, rather than one-off decisions in response to pressure,” the letter concludes. “We also ask that, during and after the pandemic, the City invest further in permanent housing and that notice of transfers be provided with significant time to ensure residents can adequately prepare.”
De Blasio’s office did not immediately answer a request for comment.
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