A person experiencing homelessness sits with their belongings on the street during the coronavirus pandemic in New York City. | Cindy Ord / Getty Images
The city will relocate people experiencing homelessness, who have been given hotel rooms to protect against the coronavirus from hotels and back in shelters, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday.
He did not provide a timeline for the relocation, but said the city would return from the hotel program after complaints from residents in some weeks about livability issues they owe on the facilities.
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“Once the health situation continues to improve, we will begin the process of figuring out where we can get homeless people back into safe shelters, and reduce confidence in hotels,” the Blasio told reporters. “Hotels [are] certainly not where we want to be in general, and we will begin that process immediately. “
Thousands of homeless people were relocated to hotel rooms amid complaints that Covid-19 had spread like wildfire in the city’s full-fledged shelters.
But the move to hotels, which the administration initially opposed to the Blasio, has received its own outpouring of complaints from residents of the surrounding neighborhoods.
The largest number of hotels are located in Midtown, still largely abandoned by office workers, NY1 reported, and neighbors have complained about visibly intoxicated men gathering on the street without masks, using drugs in public and getting into disputes.
Residents of Hell’s Kitchen told the Daily News that they were abducted by homeless men and witnessed public masturbation and urination on the sidewalk. There have also been focal complaints from the Upper West Side.
Prior to the complaint, the Blasio had suggested that people experiencing homelessness could stay in hotel rooms until there is a Covid-19 vaccine. “It’s a matter of months until there’s a fax and the crisis is over – then we’ll bring people back into the shelter system from those hotels,” he said earlier this month.
But on Monday, he said the process of pulling out hotels would begin now, although he did not provide details.
‘What happened, again, was a crisis that forced us to use hotels. We have now started the process of reducing trust in hotels, ‘he said, adding that officials’ ensure we can get people out of these hotels, relieve some of the pressure on those communities, but do it in a way that is really safe for all involved, starting with those who are homeless. ”
The mayor also said he would personally visit Hell’s Kitchen to see the problems first, and has urged city officials to support their response to quality of life.
