A century-old New York building that’s been overhauled with offices is set to become the city’s latest large intake center for migrants illegally crossing over the southern United States border.
Austell Place, a few subway stops from midtown Manhattan in Long Island City, Queens, plans to add nearly 1,000 migrants to the five-story building, making it the city’s 16th large migrant intake center after having housed 300 on the top two levels, New York City Deputy Mayor for Health and Human Services Anne Williams-Isom said Wednesday in a statement. The city has opened more than 200 sites to accommodate more than 100,000 migrants who have arrived since April 2022, Williams-Isom said.
The 170,334-square-foot Austell Place, owned by Cannon Hill Capital Partners and debuting in 1916, was renovated in 2019, according to CoStar data. The building is 100% vacant, CoStar data shows.
The property is in the Northwest Queens market, which has become a thriving residential neighborhood. But its average office vacancy of 15.2% is sitting above the city’s record-high average of 13.2%, CoStar data shows. The office availability rate, currently at 16.9%, is more than the pre-pandemic level of 16%, according to a CoStar analysis.
“The submarket still grapples with the fact that companies with a presence in Manhattan have historically been more willing to relocate a fraction of their workforce outside the borough rather than move their entire operations to a submarket like Northwest Queens,” according to CoStar. “While leasing has occurred in spurts over recent quarters, market participants believe that current conditions will continue throughout the majority of 2023 as the uncertainty of a near-term recession lingers.”
Austell Place isn’t the only office property in the city that houses migrants. For example, the Candler office tower at 220 W. 42nd St. in Times Square and 455 Jefferson St. in Brooklyn have been turned into large intake centers, according to the city.
More than 100 of New York’s hotels have been used to house migrants, which has given a boost to the city’s hotel occupancy rate because of a rise in contract hotel accommodations that involve bookings of 10 or more rooms. Among hotels that now house migrants, the century-old Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan, in its heyday known as the “Grand Dame of Madison Avenue,” has joined the luxury Row NYC and Stewart Hotel as well as the Watson Hotel and the Financial District’s 50-story Holiday Inn, billed as the world’s tallest under the brand, as large intake centers.
Famed restauranteur Danny Meyer’s Union Square Hospitality Group recently closed two of its restaurants in the luxury Redbury New York hotel because the hospitality property has been turned into a migrant housing site.
“This issue will destroy New York City,” Mayor Eric Adams said Wednesday at a community event, referring to migrants. “We're getting 10,000 migrants a month. One time we were just getting Venezuela. Now we're getting Ecuador. Now we're getting Russian-speaking coming through Mexico. We've got Western Africa. Now we're getting people from all over the globe. ... We have a $12 billion deficit that we're going to have to cut.”