New York was given the green light to build a homeless shelter in an extremely expensive area of Manhattan known as “Billionnaire’s Row” after a three-year legal battle.
The Democratic mayor’s office has defended this project since 2018 on 58th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, where the Park Savoy Hotel was previously located.
A group of neighbors gathered in the “West 58th Street Coalition” denounced the project in court, and highlighted above all the fire risks in this 1910 building.
But the New York appeals court rejected his objections, allowing the project to move forward.
“We hope to open the doors in this place as quickly as possible,” said a spokesman for the mayor’s social services department after the court ruling.
“Billionnaire’s Row” is an area of ultra-luxurious residential skyscrapers at the southern end of Central Park that includes some of the most expensive homes in the world.
Many rich and famous live there, including billionaire Michael Dell, who according to press reports bought a duplex in the One57 building in this area in 2014 for $ 100.4 million, or billionaire Ken Griffin, who bought a quadruplex there in 2019. for 238 million dollars.
The shelter plans to host 150 people, all employed or actively seeking employment. It will be monitored by security personnel 24 hours, and there will be a telephone line that will also work 24 hours to answer questions from residents of the neighborhood, said the mayor’s spokesman.
The decision comes as New York tries to relocate thousands of homeless people who were placed in Manhattan hotels during the pandemic, especially near Times Square. The mayor’s office hopes that tourists will start arriving soon, and that those hotels will reopen to their regular public.
During the pandemic, the number of homeless people on the streets of Manhattan increased, fueling controversy about what the mayor’s office should do in a city where rents are so expensive that they are inaccessible for many families.
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