NEW YORK: Hundreds of asylum seekers have been sheltered at the New York Roosevelt, which was once a four-star hotel owned by the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA).

“We opened the Roosevelt Hotel a few days ago, 800 rooms were filled,” New York Mayor Eric Adams said at a recent news briefing. The hotel has a capacity of a little over 1,000.

Mayor Adams said they rented the hotel because there’s no more room in the city to keep the immigrants. “We are looking at every available space” to keep the immigrants “including a vacant school building that was not being used.”

According to the mayor’s office, since last year, nearly 70,000 migrants have passed through New York, and overly 42,000 are still in the city’s care.

Local media reported that the city has acquired 1,025 hotel rooms for 36 months at the rate of $200 a day. This will cost the city administration an estimated $225 million over three years. Dawn has not been able to independently confirm these details.

PIA shuttered the hotel in 2020 due to financial strains brought on by the COVID pandemic, though a handful of businesses still operate storefronts on the ground floor of the building. The repurposing of the Roosevelt Hotel not only provides shelter for the asylum seekers but also supplements the city’s effort to help New York hotels recover from the losses caused by the pandemic.

PIA announced that the hotel has resumed its operations after the agreement, and sent a letter to the Pak­istan Stock Exchange, confirming the development.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2023