The city has been cracking down on Single Room Occupancy [SRO] buildings that operate as illegal tourist hotels. But the crackdown has caused an uproar on the Upper West Side, where the owner of The Hotel Alexander has decided to turn the seven-floor building on West 94th Street into a 200-bed shelter for homeless men. At a protest outside the building yesterday, politicians rallied against the plan, demanding that the building be used for low-income housing, not a homeless shelter.
"State lawmakers passed a law cracking down on illegal hotels in an effort to protect permanent housing sources, not as an unintended loophole for the City's use," said Manhattan Borough President Scott M. Stringer in a statement. "The introduction of a homeless shelter to any neighborhood requires community consultation. But the Department of Homeless Services [DHS] failed to seek this input from Community Board 7, local elected officials and from the 10 Upper West Siders who happen to permanently reside in 306 West 94th Street. This is an unacceptable situation, and before moving forward the City and DHS must work proactively to resolve a host of community concerns."
The remaining full-time residents at The Hotel Alexander are the ones whose presence enabled the owner to exploit a legal loophole and rent out the other rooms to tourists. The owner insists he's going to let them stay, but the Daily News reports that the city is requiring them to vacate. "I'm very afraid," Hilda Soto, a 25-year resident of the Alexander, tells the News. "I don't eat. I don't sleep. I was crying." DHS and Samaritan Village Inc. already have a $7.9 million contract in place to take over the building, and longtime resident Angel Adan tells the Post, "I've been under pressure to leave. [They have] tried to scare me and told me there would be problems with my family if I didn't move."
And Marti Weithman at the Goddard Riverside SRO Law Project says, "The city provides enormous incentives to SRO owners to force tenants out of their homes by offering lucrative contracts for these placements. The irony is that if a tenant who pays $400 a month for an SRO room is forced out of their home they could enter the homeless system and be placed in another SRO with the City paying upwards of $3,000 per month at the expense of tax payers." It's unclear what can be done to nullify the contract at this point, but a spokeswoman with DHS insists agency had "closely communicated with Council Member Brewer and Community Board 7 regarding the proposal on several occasions."
