New York City to Shutter Migrant Shelter, Pose Redev

With the city poised to close the migrant shelter at the Roosevelt Hotel in the coming months, a major real estate opportunity may be at hand.

The loss of the migrant intake center could lead to a full-block development at 45 East 45th Street, Crain’s reported. A date for the center’s closure isn’t clear, but the city plans to transfer the functions of the facility elsewhere in the next few months.

The century-old, 1,025-key hotel closed in October 2020 at the height of the pandemic. The future of the property seemed cloudy at best; the Hotel Trades Council accused ownership of failing to comply with the city severance payments, while an Australian mining company tried to take ownership of the property as the result of a mineral rights dispute with Pakistan, which owns the hotel through a state-run corporation.

Relief came two years ago when the city opted to lease the hotel from Pakistan for three years and $220 million over the life of the deal. It’s unclear if the city will fulfill its lease obligations if the center closes before the deal is supposed to end.

But Pakistan has been operating on a parallel track since the end of 2023 when it tapped JLL to bring the hotel on the 43,000-square-foot site to market. At the time, the brokerage was planning to solicit developer proposals for a potential teardown.

One candidate to swoop in could be SL Green. Late last year, a JPMorgan analyst said the office landlord was looking for a large-scale development site and the hotel has “essentially been a placeholder for a major office tower for many years.”

There is an emerging pipeline of alternative plans for migrant shelters, though many could also return to hotel status down the line. RXR is eyeing a mixed-use campus at 47 Hall Street in Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, which has a shelter that is expected to close by June.

The city aims to close 53 emergency shelters by June as the migrant population wanes.

— Holden Walter-Warner