From ‘Illegal’ Hotel to Housing for the Homeless on Upper West Side

The foyer of the Manhattan constructing as soon as generally known as the Royal Park Resort nonetheless beckons to vacationers: An indication advertises low-cost shuttle rides to close by airports, and rows of pamphlets promote Broadway musicals and sights just like the Guggenheim Museum.

However no one has checked in for the reason that pandemic swept into New York and crushed its tourism trade. As a substitute, the seven-story constructing on the Higher West Facet is being transformed into everlasting housing for homeless individuals — a part of an pressing push to alleviate the town’s extreme housing disaster.

The story of the Royal Park is, partially, a narrative of how what was as soon as a tenement got here to be a flash level within the metropolis’s long-running struggle in opposition to constructing house owners who illegally hire out rooms to vacationers as an alternative of long-term residents.

But it surely additionally underscores a big means that the pandemic might remake the town by turning struggling accommodations and vacant workplace buildings into housing.

The necessity is acute. Between 2000 and 2017, New York Metropolis added 643,000 new jobs, however solely permitted roughly 390,000 new housing items, in keeping with metropolis figures, serving to to drive up housing prices and tip extra individuals into homelessness.

Efforts to provide you with new methods to extend the housing provide are going down elsewhere. California, which faces its personal housing and homelessness disaster, has moved to transform dozens of accommodations into 1000’s of houses. Comparable efforts in New York have lagged, nonetheless, largely as a result of land use guidelines and different restrictions make shopping for and changing accommodations complicated and costly.

Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed easing some guidelines, and Mayor Eric Adams has additionally referred to as for revamping metropolis constructing codes to hurry conversion tasks that he stated might present tens of 1000’s of latest items.

But when tourism rebounds, these efforts could possibly be stifled.

“Proper now, we’re offered with a time-limited alternative that we’d not go up,” stated Brenda Rosen, the president and chief govt of Breaking Floor, a nonprofit targeted on housing.

Between 1990 and 2004, the group transformed three accommodations close to Occasions Sq. into housing, largely for previously homeless people; bureaucratic hurdles and expense saved the quantity low, Ms. Rosen stated. In 2018, the group purchased a fourth lodge close to Downtown Brooklyn, anticipated to open this spring.

The transformation of the Royal Park additionally displays a feud between the town and operators of unlawful accommodations, who officers say have made a power housing scarcity worse by limiting leases to short-term visitors in violation of metropolis and state legal guidelines.

Metropolis officers waged authorized battles for years with Hank Freid, a hotelier who owned the Royal Park on West 97th Road, arguing that a number of of his accommodations and hostels have been supposed to be everlasting housing.

Earlier this yr, the Fortune Society purchased the constructing for $11 million. The nonprofit focuses on serving to previously incarcerated individuals, who will make up most of the constructing’s new tenants.

“It was a possibility to buy a property that we’d by no means be capable of afford,” stated JoAnne Web page, the president and chief govt of the Fortune Society.

Mr. Freid has not publicly stated why he bought the constructing. He didn’t reply to requests for remark, and his lawyer, Ronald J. Rosenberg, declined to remark via a spokesman.

Conversions will be simpler when buildings have been already designated for everlasting housing, because the Royal Park was. On the Royal Park and a minimum of one different unlawful lodge, one other seven- story constructing on the Higher West Facet that’s being transformed into housing for low-income older adults, most of the bureaucratic roadblocks have been eradicated.

A spokesman for the town’s Buildings Division stated information from the 1910s, among the many earliest that have been instantly out there, point out that the Royal Park was initially a tenement. It was later transformed into greater than 100 single-room occupancy, or S.R.O., items, which generally have shared loos or kitchens.

S.R.O.’s have been as soon as an enormous a part of New York Metropolis’s inexpensive housing inventory, however many have been systematically eradicated between the Nineteen Fifties and the Nineteen Eighties, as metropolis officers and the general public more and more related them with poverty and crime.

Many have been torn down and changed with luxurious houses, notably in prosperous neighborhoods just like the Higher West Facet.

Mr. Freid, who owns different accommodations in New York Metropolis and Florida and runs a yacht chartering enterprise, bought the constructing in 2004, in keeping with metropolis information, and marketed it as an affordable lodge for guests. A list for the lodge on the web site TripAdvisor promotes the Royal Park as being near retailers and bars and a brief practice experience to Midtown and downtown.

In 2017, the town filed a lawsuit, accusing Mr. Freid of working the lodge illegally when it was purported to be everlasting housing. The lawsuit additionally cited a number of violations, together with an absence of correct lighting round exits, obstructed hearth escapes and too few emergency exits.

Mr. Freid argued in authorized filings that most of the violations had been dismissed or resolved, and that the constructing’s classification didn’t forestall him from working it as a lodge.

However he ultimately determined to promote the constructing to the Fortune Society.

After the sale was finalized, the town settled its lawsuit, and Mr. Freid agreed to pay roughly $1.1 million in penalties, although he admitted no wrongdoing.

Ms. Web page stated the constructing will open to new residents subsequent yr. Of the 82 items, 58 are slated to be stuffed by individuals residing in homeless shelters, and one other 9 flats will likely be stuffed via the town’s inexpensive housing lottery.

The rest of the items are reserved for a small variety of tenants who’ve been residing within the constructing for years, and in some instances, for many years.

The constructing, in keeping with the Fortune Society, will present on-site assist companies, like case managers to assist individuals with vitamin, employment and substance abuse.

The entire price, together with the rehabilitation and operation, is roughly $31 million, which Ms. Web page stated the nonprofit was working to lift. The town was additionally anticipated to contribute.

Mr. Adams stated the conversion was the form of modern technique his administration would pursue to deal with the necessity for housing.

“We want a response with the urgency to match the disaster, and we’ll discover each alternative, in each nook of the town, to create the inexpensive housing New Yorkers want and deserve,” he stated in a press release.

Housing advocates and a few Higher West Facet residents stated the deal was wanted in a neighborhood that has grown wealthier and more and more white.

However some residents have expressed concern in regards to the plans for the constructing and its future tenants, echoing the tensions that erupted within the neighborhood in 2020 when homeless males have been briefly moved into the Lucerne Resort, a few mile to the south.

Throughout public remark at a neighborhood board assembly in February, a girl who stated she owned a neighborhood enterprise and was recognized solely as Kim stated she and different small enterprise house owners have been “upset and anxious about what’s coming.’’ She famous that they have been already grappling with issues like loitering, panhandling and shoplifting, in keeping with a video of the assembly.

The chairman of the neighborhood board that covers many of the Higher West Facet, Steven Brown, stated he was impressed with the Fortune Society’s willingness to interact with residents, however added that the board solely realized of the challenge in mid-February, when the Adams administration issued a information launch.

“I do suppose that the neighborhood board would have preferred to have been concerned alongside the way in which,” he stated. “I’m not saying that will have modified something.”

Arturo Coto, 70, has lived within the constructing since 1988, three years after he immigrated to New York from Honduras. Earlier than the pandemic, he stated he loved assembly lodge visitors from world wide.

He was not nervous in regards to the new tenants so long as he continued to have an inexpensive place to dwell, even when he must nonetheless share a rest room within the hallway and dwell with no sink or range.

The month-to-month hire is about $346, and he lives largely on what he receives from Social Safety. (Ms. Web page stated items like Mr. Coto’s are rent-regulated and the hire will stay the identical.)

“There aren’t sufficient houses for individuals residing on the streets,” Mr. Coto stated. “I need these individuals to have houses but additionally allow us to dwell right here.”

Ana Ley contributed reporting, and Susan C. Beachy contributed analysis.