The first New York City homicide of 2021 occurred on New Year’s Day in Kew Gardens, Queens, at the Umbrella Hotel, which already seemed aptly named, for the cover it provided over a thunderstorm of illegal activity. Throughout the previous summer, people in the neighborhood had complained about shootings, drug use and prostitution at the hotel. Covid was devastating the hospitality industry; rates at the Umbrella had dropped to $80 a night, and rooms were taken by partyers, disruptive often to the point of violence. Five miles away, at an airport motel in July 2020, two teenage girls were held captive and forced to have sex with strangers.
The lawlessness continued even as Covid receded. Last year, Bronx prosecutors indicted several people involved in a child sex trafficking ring that operated out of a hotel on the edges of Soundview, among them the manager, a front desk clerk and a security guard. At the time, the district attorney, Darcel Clark, argued for the regulation of hotels “in a manner where they cannot host criminal activity for years without bearing responsibility.”
Of the 769 hotels in New York City, a vast majority are safe, but it remains a strange facet of local governance that despite the particular vulnerabilities they present, hotels are not subject to the same sort of scrutiny that so many other businesses are. Unlike restaurants, bars, nail salons, newsstands, locksmiths, used-car dealerships, carwashes and even scrap-metal processors, among others, no license is required to run a hotel in a place that attracts tens of millions of visitors a year.
Developers must get building permits, follow zoning rules and demonstrate an adherence to fire codes, but beyond that, oversight is essentially laissez-faire. This is why hotels where chaos reigns, typically far from the center of Manhattan or chic Brooklyn and room-service truffle fries, are so difficult to shut down — why they can “host criminal activity for years without bearing responsibility” — and why it took the murder of a 20-year-old man for the city to finally close the hotel in Kew Gardens.
Neighbors had been bringing grievances to local politicians, who had little recourse. “It was really frustrating,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had been trying to close the hotel for months, told me. He was finally able to do it a few days after the hotel’s most disturbing incident.
“When I went into office, I didn’t have a chart in my mind of what’s city and what is state,” he said, referring to the different jurisdictions under which certain businesses fall, distinctions that can be confusing and arbitrary and allow some industries to fall through the cracks. It was galling to him that it took a death to be able to exercise some authority. “When something becomes a matter of public safety, we need the ability to act,” he said. “Of course there should be due process. But we need the preventive to keep these problems from festering and getting worse.”
Two weeks ago, Julie Menin, a member of the City Council representing the Upper East Side and a former commissioner of the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, introduced a bill that would require hotels to be licensed, as they are in most major cities around the country. The hotel industry felt blindsided even though a similar bill had been proposed a few years earlier by another council member, only to be shelved during the pandemic.
Could hotel owners afford to concede to these new demands? “The hotel industry has not — let me repeat, not — recovered from 2019,” Vijay Dandapani, the president and chief executive of the Hotel Association of New York City, the industry trade group, told me. “The only other city that’s worse off is San Francisco.” The industry’s objection essentially boils down to: Haven’t we been through enough?
Roughly 6,000 hotel rooms in New York’s inventory were lost to the Covid crisis. And what amounted to the end of Airbnb in New York over the past year and the placement of asylum seekers in hotels have only driven up room costs, which may be one reason that tourism rates, though close to prepandemic levels, have not come back completely. By comparison, occupancy levels in competitor cities — Paris, London, Tokyo — are now higher than they were before the pandemic.
There were other concerns as well. Zoning regulations implemented last year effectively ended new hotel construction in the city. What Mr. Dandapani described as a “cumbersome” application process inhibited financing. “Let’s say I’m a developer going to my lenders and say I want to build a hotel on 42nd and 10th,” he speculated. “They’ll say, ‘Do you have your permits?’” The likely answer is no. Only one prospective hotel has been approved since the new rules went into effect — in Willets Point, Queens.
A hearing on the hotel bill that had been scheduled for this week was postponed so that hotel owners, the affiliated labor union and the City Council, where the bill had 26 co-sponsors, could come to some kind of agreement about its language and various stipulations. A revised version of the proposed legislation, almost certain to pass, pulled back from insisting on a certain number of front desk attendants and security guards but would require “continuous coverage” of the front desk, panic buttons for all employees, daily room cleaning and a prohibition on short-term bookings — those fewer than eight hours long — in all but airport hotels. (An unintended consequence of the law, should it pass, is a higher cost to infidelity.)
The bill has the strong support of the city’s five district attorneys. A few days ago they sent a letter to the Council pointing out that criminal complaints to the Police Department “originate from hotels and motels at a far higher rate than from other types of locations.” Beyond that, complaints from guests to the city’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection doubled during the last five years. The bill is significant to the union because it deals with worker-safety issues. As one housekeeper, Luis Ruiz, who had been cleaning rooms for an outfit subcontracted by a hotel on the Far West Side, explained to me, he was often left getting rid of hypodermic needles without the benefit of protective gear. When he complained to hotel management, he said, he was never again given a shift.
The city’s political and business leaders are forever reminding doubters on crime that New York cannot thrive — and cannot attract companies or tourists or young families — if the city doesn’t feel safe. Most people who come to spend a few days are not staying at the Carlyle; many end up in small, relatively inexpensive hotels in Brooklyn or Queens, which began popping up in the early 2000s as Manhattan became more and more expensive and the places on its periphery became more enticing. If you’re coming from Melbourne and the hotel you’re staying in is also housing a fentanyl operation, you may never come back — no matter how many times you want to see “Hamilton” again.
“All the licensing does is establish a system to ensure the most rudimentary public safety standards are in place,” Ms. Menin said, “to protect guests, neighborhoods and workers.”
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