Floyd Wilson was weeks away from getting into a new studio apartment. The disabled veteran lost everything when his basement apartment was flooded by the remnants of Hurricane Ida in 2021.
After months of delays and red tape, he was waiting on the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development to sign off on the new unit so he could finally move out of the Downtown Manhattan hotel where he’d been staying for several months. But instead of getting a key to his new place on Tuesday, Wilson packed a backpack of essentials and headed off to a city shelter.
“I gotta deal with what I gotta deal with. I gotta survive,” Wilson said. “I might as well just be a caveman again, living like a caveman. I didn't do anything to deserve this.”
Wilson, 59, was among the members of roughly 70 households – first displaced from their homes by Hurricane Ida's remnants in 2021 – who were forced to move again on Tuesday, leaving the Downtown Manhattan hotel where they had been staying for the past several months.
Floyd Wilson was forced to move out of the hotel where he'd been staying as part of a program for those displaced by Hurricane Ida
Some of those leaving the Millennium on Tuesday said they’d be couch surfing with friends. Around 10 households were able to make it back into permanent housing by the end of the day, according to the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development. Others planned to head to shelter intake, while others were sleeping on the subway, according to residents and attorneys for homeless New Yorkers.
Attorney Joshua Goldfein, a lawyer for the Legal Aid Society, which was advocating for the remaining tenants, said many of the displaced were people with disabilities who had already qualified for apartments and were waiting for the paperwork to be finalized before they could move in.
“There’s really no point in throwing these disabled households out in the middle of a snowstorm when they could be moved into permanent housing in a matter of weeks,” Goldfein said. “The people in need of assistance at the end of the program are the people with the highest level of need. They're our neighbors. They should be treated better.”
A FEMA program had been footing the bill for the residents' hotel stay at the Millennium through December, and the city started picking up the tab via a $1.4 million contract in place through the end of February, Gothamist previously reported. Residents were told they’d have to move in mid-January, The City reported.
Of the 380 households that were getting housing assistance through the original program, 310 of them had already been able to move into permanent housing ahead of the Tuesday relocation, according to Ilana Maier, a spokesperson for the city’s Department of Housing and Preservation. The agency was working to expedite the housing cases of some residents, Maier said, while others were offered a bus ride to a shelter intake site.
“This is an all-hands-on-deck, cross-agency effort to ensure every household knows where they are going and has access to all of the packing supplies, storage, transportation, emotional support, and assistance to get safely to their next destination,” Maier said. “To be clear, a hotel is not a sustainable long-term housing option for the city or the people staying there.”
Goldfein decried the city for the move, and chastised the housing agency for calling police to force out residents last week. Video emerged of police officers with semiautomatic rifles and tactical gear entering the hotel.
HPD spokesperson Maier said an Emergency Services Unit was called to the hotel when several people were given earlier move out dates, but ultimately not needed to gain access to the hotel room.
Goldfein said people were being treated like “trespassers rather than clients with a high level of need.” Several residents said the police presence rattled other residents and young children at the hotel. An autistic man with impaired mobility who was forced out last week was now sleeping on the subway, even though he was also just days away from getting into a new apartment, according to Goldfein.
Wilson was among those just weeks away from being able to move into a new apartment. He said his case workers mixed up his housing voucher paperwork, which stalled his apartment hunt for months. When his papers were all in order, he agreed to take the first studio apartment he saw, but was waiting for HPD to approve the apartment so he could move again.
“I’m here again waiting on New York City to do an inspection so I can move in,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m gonna be in the street.”
The city's housing agency declined to comment on Wilson’s case.
Ahead of the planned move, residents drifted in and out of the hotel, lugging bags and boxes, and offering each other advice and moral support. One man gave another the location of shelter intakes on Manhattan's East Side, near Bellevue Hospital. Others stood with their belongings in the hotel lobby, trying to figure out where to go next.
Patricia Stone, 50, was waiting for a ride to a friend’s house and said she would be able to move into a new apartment soon.
”The program is done and I’m grateful I did have somewhere to lay my head,” she said. “I wasn't homeless.”
While some were optimistic about their next move, Maria Molina, 26, a homeless college student whose Bronx basement apartment flooded during Ida, said she was left pondering a difficult decision: Should she go to a shelter and pay her storage facility fee to prevent her belongings from being auctioned off next week – or scrape together some cash for a room?
“It’s either a bed, or the little bit of clothing I was able to save, because I don’t have money to buy any more,” she said in Spanish. “It’s affecting my grades, my mental health. We’re in the air.”
This story has been updated with new information.
