The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City is laying off most of its workers as the city ends its use as a migrant shelter. After housing tens of thousands of migrants since 2022, the hotel will close its doors this June.
Key Facts:
- The Roosevelt Hotel will lay off 96 of its 103 employees due to a “contract termination.”
- It served as a central intake site for over 230,000 migrants arriving in NYC between 2022 and early 2024.
- The city paid roughly $75 million annually to use the hotel as a shelter, at $200 per room nightly.
- Migrant arrivals have dropped from 4,000 per week to 350, prompting citywide shelter closures.
- The Stewart Hotel and healthcare provider DocGo also announced layoffs as city contracts end.
The Rest of The Story:
The Roosevelt Hotel, once a hub for incoming migrants in Manhattan, will stop operating as a city-run shelter by June.
The closure is part of a larger rollback of migrant housing facilities across New York, triggered by a sharp drop in new arrivals.
Since 2022, the hotel acted as a centralized migrant intake center, often called “the new Ellis Island.”
With over 1,000 rooms priced at $200 a night under a city contract, the cost to taxpayers topped $75 million annually.
However, as the number of migrants arriving in the city slowed and budgets tightened, Mayor Eric Adams announced the shelter’s upcoming closure.
This week, formal layoff notices were filed for 96 hotel workers.
The Stewart Hotel and DocGo are also ending operations tied to migrant care.
All three cite contract termination as the reason for their staff cuts.
Roosevelt Hotel, a symbol of NYC migrant crisis, will fire most workers https://t.co/MYn7prKpDE pic.twitter.com/EnPWycej1M
— 1010 WINS on 92.3 FM (@1010WINS) March 28, 2025
Commentary:
While it’s unfortunate that so many hotel workers are losing their jobs, this chapter should have ended long ago.
Taxpayers have shelled out tens of millions of dollars to turn luxury hotels into long-term shelters.
That’s not a sustainable solution, and it’s not what those buildings were meant for.
The Roosevelt Hotel was once a symbol of New York elegance.
Turning it into temporary housing for non-citizens diverted it far from its purpose, while other parts of the city struggled with growing homelessness and stretched public resources.
There’s no denying the humanitarian challenge posed by large-scale migrant arrivals.
But the city’s answer—to convert prime real estate into taxpayer-funded shelters—was both financially irresponsible and unfair to residents and workers alike.
The Roosevelt Hotel in NYC has 1,025 rooms and American taxpayers are currently paying for every one of those rooms to be filled by illegal immigrants – At a cost of $6,000 per family of illegals, per month.
To add insult to injury, the hotel is actually owned by the Pakistani… pic.twitter.com/orHvPB443y
— Bernie Moreno (@berniemoreno) September 4, 2023
Now that arrivals have slowed, it’s time to restore balance.
The Roosevelt, and other hotels like it, should return to serving visitors and generating economic activity.
Local businesses, tourism, and hotel workers all benefit when these spaces are used as originally intended.
Hopefully, the transition away from emergency shelter use allows for better planning and smarter resource allocation moving forward.
Relying on luxury hotels as a permanent fix never made sense—and now, even City Hall seems to agree.
The Bottom Line:
The Roosevelt Hotel is shutting down its role in New York’s migrant response, ending a costly chapter that stretched city resources.
With migrant arrivals slowing, officials are backing off expensive shelter deals.
Though workers will be impacted, this move is a necessary step toward fiscal sanity.
The hope now is that the hotel—and the city—can get back to business as usual.
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