Summer tourists in New York City face unprecedented lodging costs as hotels throughout the city are being repurposed as migrant housing.
The average price for a hotel room in the city, based on 2023 data, is a record-breaking $301 per night, an 8.5 percent increase from 2022 costs. This rise in prices is largely due to the city’s gross overcommitment to providing shelter for the influx of illegal migrants flooding the city.
A recent change to Gotham’s “right to shelter” rule allows adult illegal migrants under the age of 23 to stay up to 60 days in city-run shelters. Originally, migrants were granted 30 days of government-subsidized housing with the ability to reapply for an extended stay.
The city pays hotels to host thousands of migrants, which creates a lodging shortage and exorbitant prices for visitors. Skyrocketing hotel costs are a direct result of this government-created scarcity — with fewer hotel rooms to go around, costs inevitably increase, especially during the summer tourism boom. And of course, hotels have been quick to gobble up the city’s migrant-housing subsidy money over the past couple of years, after the government’s Covid lockdowns minimized travel and dried up their stream of income. Now NYC tourism is back in full force — but hotel availability is not.
“New York City has led the nation in responding to a national humanitarian crisis, providing shelter and care to approximately 183,000 new arrivals since the spring of 2022, but we have been clear, from day one, that
