AP Photo De Blasio administration seeks vendors to help find hotels for homeless

The de Blasio administration is looking for vendors to take over the job of finding hotel rooms in bulk for homeless New Yorkers, even as Mayor Bill de Blasio says he views hotels as a temporary, less-than-desirable solution to the city’s homelessness crisis.

The city on Thursday issued a request for proposals for contractors to book hotel rooms, a measure Department of Homeless Services officials said would allow the city to save money on the cost of renting commercial hotel rooms. The city currently spends $400,000 each day to house about 7,200 people in 3,300 hotel rooms. The city’s use of hotels has expanded dramatically over the past year.


In February of 2016, 10 months ago, there were 2,656 homeless people living in hotel rooms across the city.

De Blasio has said the city intends to stop using hotels to shelter the homeless at some point, although it is unclear when that will happen.

"There will be moments when, because there is a particular need, we may have to turn to hotels but, the goal is to use hotels less and less and eventually stop using hotels altogether," he said in February this year.

It’s also a concession by Department of Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks, who was once a fervent critic of the use of hotels to house the city’s homeless, when he described the idea as “poorly conceived.”

"For the city to be using the Yellow Pages to find commercial hotels for families flies in the face of everything we know about how to solve this problem," Banks said in 1991, when he was an attorney at the Legal Aid Society, in response to the Dinkins administration’s use of commercial hotels to house the homeless.

The city is currently spending $1.2 billion per year on shelter costs for the city’s homeless population, which has risen to more than 60,000 this year.

The city pays an average of $170 per night for single adults to rent hotel rooms, and an average of $174 per night for families with children.

For more than two years, the city has been using emergency declarations to rent out the hotel rooms. The administration has said that formalizing the rental process by using a vendor would save the city money, and create better oversight of services for homeless clients. The contracts would be for a period of between three and nine years, according to a notice published in the City Record.

“The City plans to reduce the use of commercial hotels when we can open more ongoing regular shelters, but meanwhile using a contract insures cost efficiency, transparency and, since contracts will include performance standards, better oversight of conditions and services,” said Banks, in a statement.

DHS said the RFP would allow a vendor to procure as many as 3,900 hotel rooms, with 2,500 of them set aside for families with children, and would bring in vendors to provide services for homeless clients, addressing a concern raised by many critics of the city’s hotel policy, who say the hotels lack the breadth of services available to people living in the city’s permanent shelters.

It’s unclear how much money the city would save from the new procurement measure, an HRA spokesman said.

“We can’t really estimate the amount we will save because we don’t know for sure how many hotel rooms we will need over the course of the contract. But contracting is always a better way to purchase anything and gives better control of costs and services, as noted. We are asking nonprofit providers to negotiate flat rates with hotels for periods of time,” said David Neustadt, a spokesperson for the Human Resources Administration.

In a statement Thursday, DHS said the city still wants to end its use of hotels to house the city’s homeless, but admitted it must keep relying on their use until more shelters can be opened. The city has said it intends to open more shelters, but has not yet released details about those plans.

“The City is committed to phasing out the use of commercial hotels to house the homeless. However, until it is able to open sufficient contracted shelters, the City will continue to need commercial hotel capacity to meet the legally mandated requirement to provide shelter,” DHS said in the statement.

Some homeless services providers applauded the new policy, which they said would address the necessity of providing services to homeless people living in hotels.

Muzzy Rosenblatt, head of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, one of the city’s largest homeless services providers, said providing for homeless who are in hotels "gets enhanced by having professional social service staff on site who know how to support people."

Others said the city should focus its efforts on the creation of new shelters.

“We understand and can appreciate the city’s efforts to control costs by having nonprofits contract with hotels but, absent complete retrofitting of these spaces to convert them to shelters, we fear that such facilities are still not ideal,” said Catherine Trapani, Executive Director of Homeless Services United, coalition of nonprofit homeless services providers.

Trapani called on the city to work with providers to create a long-term plan to build more shelters.

The city is caught in a politically difficult position — it wants to end the use of hotels as shelters, as well as end the use of cluster sites, which are private apartments used as shelters, but the number of people approved for shelter has been increasing. The administration is prioritizing ending the use of clusters before it ends the use of hotels because clusters take private apartments off the rental market and also often have hazardous conditions.

Building new shelters has become a fraught proposition in neighborhoods where residents oppose them, and the de Blasio administration had slowed the pace of opening new shelters since the mayor first took office.

In a statement, de Blasio spokeswoman Aja Worthy-Davis said the city’s residents need to realize that those shelters are necessary.

“We want to transition out of housing homeless in commercial hotels, and to do that we need greater acceptance that shelters are needed citywide,” Worthy-Davis said. “In two years, over 30 shelters have been established. As we continue these efforts, ensuring manageable costs is vital.”