New York’s Staten Island. According to information obtained by the Advance/SILive.com, the owners of three Travis hotels that have been converted into migrant shelters recently launched a contentious facility in Port Richmond.
The Days Inn at 37 Port Richmond Ave. was opened by the Sandhu Group, a commercial real estate firm based in Nassau County, somewhere between March and October of last year.
After the Advance/SILive.com first revealed plans for the property in 2018, the hotel has long been a source of community ire, even leading to the formation of a new civic association called Port Richmond Strong.
The organization believed Sandhu organization, which had not comment for this article, would simply convert the hotel into a homeless refuge for the city.
Since then, Port Richmond Strong has changed its name to the Port Richmond North Shore Alliance. and its vice chair, Mario Buonviaggio, stated that although the neighborhood has not yet noticed a problem with the hotel, it is monitoring the area.
The ocean is calm at the moment. I’ve had several conversations with [the developer]…”We have someone who keeps an eye on the building every day,” he stated. Now that it’s here, we must deal with it.
According to Buonviaggio, a civic group member who owns real estate nearby provided shuttle bus parking for the hotel, which advertises on its website how close it is to Newark Liberty International Airport.
It is unclear if Sandhu Group will continue to operate the hotel there.
Three Travis hotels, which are currently owned by Sandhu Group, were utilized by the city to shelter residents during the migrant crisis that started in the spring of 2022.
One of the hotels, the Holiday Inn Express at 300 Wild Ave., will close in April, according to a recent announcement by Mayor Eric Adams. The other two, which are now owned by Sandhu, will stay open.
In other parts of the city, Sandhu Group has also come under fire. Assemblyman William Colton (D-Brooklyn) criticized the business in 2021 when it purchased real estate in his district’s Bath Beach neighborhood.
According to him at the time, this developer buys buildings and constructs hotels where it makes little sense to do so, just to rent out the hotel’s tiny rooms to the city at exorbitant prices, putting the homeless in unsuitable cubicles.
In the end, Sandhu didn’t construct a shelter there. Under previous Mayor Michael Bloomberg, hotel-to-shelter conversions became a profitable industry, with corporations earning millions of dollars in public contracts and locations springing up all over the city.
With the final hotel shelter shutting at the end of 2021, Mayor Bill de Blasio ended that practice; nevertheless, the migrant crisis sent over 200,000 people into the five boroughs, prompting Adams’ administration to reestablish such facilities.
Adams’ government has started to close several of its emergency shelters as the migrant crisis has eased in recent months, but Port Richmonders will be watching 37 Port Richmond Ave.
We keep an eye on it. According to Buonviaggio, we have observed a wide variety of people entering and leaving the area, all of them are hotel visitors. We’re watching the hotel.
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