UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — The Upper East Side is finally helping out with the citywide migrant shelter crisis.
The Bentley, a luxury hotel standing in the shadow of the Queensborough Bridge that provided emergency shelter in the early days of the pandemic, is now opening its doors to unhoused asylum-seeking families, according to the city.
“We have a legal and moral obligation to provide shelter to all who come to us in need,” said a Social Services department spokesperson.
“In order to meet the unprecedented demand for shelter services on the ground, our teams have worked around the clock to procure emergency shelter capacity across the City.”
This is the first emergency city shelter for asylum-seekers to open on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that already does well-below its share when it comes to helping out unhoused New Yorkers.
It might be one of the last community districts to receive such a shelter.
All 197 rooms at the Bentley Hotel, on York Avenue and East 62nd Street, will be used to help house homeless migrant families, the Department for Social Services confirmed to Patch.
The short-term contract has the hotel providing asylum-seeking families three meals a day as well as helping them find jobs, schools for the kids and health and immigration services.
Highland Park, a Brooklyn-based homelessness group the city comptroller reports has contracted nearly $20 million with the Homeless Services department over the last two years, will be the shelter’s service provider.
The Bentley served as a temporary shelter during the early days of the pandemic for a year starting in May 2020, as the city sought to fight COVID-19 by “de-densifying” the city shelter system, city officials said.
Owners Jay and Stuart Podolsky, deemed “notorious slumlords” by the New York Post, who previously reported on their long history with DHS, had secured a $50 million mortgage on the Bentley from Signature Bank in January 2020.
East Side Feed first reported the hotel’s transformation in a story that included a rumor, in a quote from a reader, that the city had taken over the hotel because of “sanitation issues,” but Social Services told Patch the city does not “seize” hotels under DHS contracts.
A hotel representative confirmed the hotel was “closing,” but declined to comment further.
Council Member Julie Menin said she was happy to help.
Said Menin, “We will work with the administration to ensure adequate resources are given to support those in need.”
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The Bentley is just one of the 103 emergency sanctuary shelters Social Services has opened across New York City since southern states began last year bussing asylum-seeking migrants to New York City.
This will be the first sanctuary on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that provides the least amount of shelter to the unhoused on the isle of Manhattan and ranks among the lowest for homeless assistance citywide.
The Upper East Side has the highest population density in the U.S., yet there were only 42 people in the neighborhood who received shelter from Homeless Services at the end of March, according to the most recent data.
In comparison, the comparatively smaller Upper West Side current houses nearly 1,700 people with Homeless Services.
The West Village and SoHo, the Manhattan region with the second fewest Homeless Services beds, has 349.
The disparity, first pointed out by West Side Rag, is even more interesting when compared to pre-pandemic numbers, when the Upper East Side routinely held about 80 Homeless Services beds.
Only .02 percent of the Upper East Side’s population resides in Homeless Services shelters, a much lower share compared to .61 percent of the Upper West Side’s population, according to the online paper’s review of February data.
When the Bentley Hotel started housing shelter residents during the early days of the pandemic, during city hall’s to “de-densify” city shelters, the population grew by about 300 until May 2021, when the hotel’s contract expired.
The only neighborhoods with a smaller DHS population than the Upper East Side are a half-dozen neighborhoods in outer Queens, Brooklyn and just one neighborhood in Staten Island who have no Homeless Services beds at all.
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