A luxury Upper East Side hotel has spent years serving as a quiet homeless shelter, and neighbors say the city cut them out of the loop entirely.<\/p>\n
The Bentley Hotel, a 21-story tower at 500 E. 62nd St. where rooms once fetched more than $200 a night, is housing 197 people under a taxpayer-funded contract, according to Highland Park Community Development Corporation, the Brooklyn nonprofit running the operation, Upper East Site first reported.<\/p>\n
It is not the building\u2019s first rodeo as a shelter. The hotel took in homeless New Yorkers displaced from crowded congregate shelters back in May 2020, part of the city\u2019s pandemic-era push to spread people out and slow the spread of COVID-19 inside dorm-style facilities.<\/p>\n
The Bentley Hotel at 500 E. 62nd St. has quietly continued operating as a homeless shelter, years after first housing displaced shelter residents during the 2020 pandemic. John Nacion\/NurPhoto \/ Shutterstock<\/p>\n
The hotel later served as a migrant shelter under a $32 million contract with Highland Park Community Development Corporation. Tamara Beckwith<\/p>\n
The Bentley resurfaced as a shelter in 2023, this time designated a Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center for asylum seekers arriving amid the migrant crisis, with Highland Park landing a $32 million contract to run it, Upper East Site reported.<\/p>\n
Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered the city\u2019s last remaining HERRC, in The Bronx, be shuttered by the end of this year. Yet the Bentley never closed. It simply got a new label.<\/p>\n
Though Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered the city\u2019s last migrant shelter closed this year, the Bentley remains open, now rebranded as a \u201cTier 2 family shelter\u201d despite no public notice to Community Board 8. Stephen Yang for NY Post<\/p>\n
Neighbors, including members of the East Side Accountability Alliance, say they don\u2019t object to the shelter itself but to the city\u2019s lack of transparency about it. James Keivom<\/p>\n
Highland Park\u2019s marketing materials now brand the property a \u201cTier 2 family shelter\u201d called \u201cYorkville Sanctuary,\u201d even though the building sits in Lenox Hill, not Yorkville. The pitch promises to help residents land on their feet.<\/p>\n
\u201cA Tier 2 family shelter, providing a safe and secure environment to families,\u201d the materials read, according to Upper East Site. \u201cThe goal of the program is to assist the families in locating affordable housing.\u201d<\/p>\n
This has the Upper East Side locals fuming. The Department of Homeless Services has a track record of alerting Community Board 8 when new shelters open nearby, notifying the board about a 92-bed site on East 91st Street and a 200-bed high-rise on First Avenue. The Bentley got no such heads up, Upper East Site found.<\/p>\n
Tyler Hollinger, owner of Festiv\u00e1l Caf\u00e9 on Second Avenue and a founding member of the East Side Accountability Alliance, said the building\u2019s status was never exactly a mystery to those paying attention.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe always knew that it was a shelter,\u201d Hollinger told Upper East Site.<\/p>\n
He argues the silence from officials fits a pattern.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s very clear that the community board and the government doesn\u2019t really care what the people think, and they\u2019re just going to do whatever they want,\u201d Hollinger said.<\/p>\n
An annual meeting takes place at the East Side Accountability Alliance. East Side Accountability Alliance \/ Instagram<\/p>\n
DSS confirmed migrant-specific shelters have been phased out but wouldn\u2019t confirm the Bentley\u2019s current use, and neither Highland Park CDC nor the hotel responded to requests for comment. LP Media for NY Post<\/p>\n
Richard Barcia, who lives on East 62nd Street, said he has no beef with the people staying there, just with the city dodging basic disclosure.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t have anything against these people \u2014 I know they need a place to live,\u201d Barcia told the outlet.<\/p>\n
He wants the city to come clean rather than let residents piece it together themselves.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhy don\u2019t they just put that out as a press release and just acknowledge what\u2019s going on?\u201d Barcia said.<\/p>\n
Michael Bailey, a member of the East Side Accountability Alliance, accused the city of stonewalling.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt seems like they\u2019re intentionally misleading us,\u201d Bailey told Upper East Site.<\/p>\n
A Department of Social Services spokesperson confirmed migrant-specific shelters have been phased out citywide but would not say what the Bentley is currently being used for, citing confidentiality rules around shelter addresses. The agency stopped short of denying the building is operating as a shelter, and did not answer follow-up questions about the terms of its contract with the hotel or what happened to people who were living there when the migrant program wound down.<\/p>\n
Highland Park CDC and the Bentley Hotel did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A luxury Upper East Side hotel has spent years serving as a quiet homeless shelter, and neighbors say the city cut them out of the loop entirely. The Bentley Hotel, a 21-story tower at 500 E. 62nd St. where rooms once fetched more than $200 a night, is housing 197 people under a taxpayer-funded contract,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16739,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[16456,14143,1720,1899,1530,392,14144,10725,332,389,2617,16457,1652,12127,16458,16459,9734,2354,2574],"class_list":["post-16738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york","tag-department-of-homeless-services","tag-homeless-shelters","tag-homelessness","tag-hotels","tag-local","tag-manhattan","tag-migrants","tag-neighbors","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-hotels","tag-petitions","tag-real-estate","tag-residential-real-estate","tag-shelters","tag-taxpayer","tag-taxpayers","tag-upper-east-side","tag-zohran-mamdani"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/vive.im\/@dc\/117288814781488886","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16738\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.diningandcooking.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}