A hotel in one of New York City’s trendiest neighborhoods has been quietly converted into emergency housing for migrants for the past several months.
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has recently awarded a $12.3 million emergency contract to a not-for-profit social service provider to run a “city sanctuary facility for families with children” at 235 Meeker Avenue in Williamsburg — the address of the Hotel Le Jolie.
The Department of Homeless Services issued the contract to the Brooklyn-based St. P.A.U.L.S. Inc. to manage the facility.
Hotel Le Jolie, located at 235 Meeker Avenue in Williamsburg, is now a shelter for an influx of migrants.Hotel Le Jolie/Facebook
Hotel Le Jolie was converted into a shelter for migrant families sometime last year, on a temporary basis.
“They are having St. P.A.U.L.S. take over the operation. Nothing functionally changes,” a source familiar with the shelter operation said over the weekend.\The source said DHS was using temporary staff at the site and hoped the not-for-profit group would provide better services for migrant families.
A person answering the phone at the location claimed the hotel was closed for “renovations” when asked if it had rooms available for tourists.
On the hotel’s Facebook page, a visitor asked last November, “Is the Hotel Le Jolie closed or still open for business?”
There was no reply.
The hotel staff’s last replies to reviews on Tripadvisor for the 55-room boutique accommodations were posted in April of last year.
Mayor Eric Adams’ administration has recently awarded a $12.3 million emergency contract to a not-for-profit social service provider to run a “city sanctuary facility for families with children.”
With the shelter system bursting at the seams, the city has gotten creative in finding housing for the influx of migrants.
Last August, the Adams administration even opened a shelter at the popular McCarren Park located on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border.
When asked about the new contract for migrants staying at the Hotel Le Jolie, a Department of Homeless Services spokesperson said, “This is not a new site – has been open for quite some time.”
The Post reached out to Hotel Le Jolie management and St. P.A.U.L.S. for comment.
The migrant crisis has been a boon for Big Apple hotels still hurting from the loss of tourism during the COVID-19 pandemic.
More than 100 hotels have agreed to convert into emergency shelters for migrant families and individuals who have flooded the city from the southern border — with the government footing the bill for the rooms.
The Adams administration also opened a shelter at the popular McCarren Park located on the Williamsburg-Greenpoint border last year.Helayne Seidman
In January, the Adams administration inked a new emergency $76.69 million contract with the Hotel Association of New York City to provide “last resort” shelter to migrant families.
Under the contract, 15 hotels in Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx will make blocks of rooms available to asylum-seeking families for up to 28 days under the “vouchering program” running through July.
The Post reported last September that the city extended contracts with the hotel association for three years at a staggering price tag of $1.3 billion — nearly five times the original $275 million deal — just to pay rental fees to the vast network of hotels converted into emergency shelters.
Adams has moved to curb mushrooming migrant costs by setting 30- and 60-day shelter stay limits for individuals and families, respectively.
Migrants line up to collect free food at Tompkins Square Park.Helayne Seidman
Nearly 200,000 migrants have arrived in the Big Apple since spring 2022, overwhelming the city’s shelter population and forcing DHS to rely on hotels and to set up massive tent cities in Floyd Bennett Field, Creedmoor Psychiatric Center and on the grounds of Kennedy Airport.
New York City is forking out an average of$387 per dayto put up a single migrant household in taxpayer-funded shelters, recent data from City Hall shows.
City Hall claimed the costs to combat the migrant migrant crisis could hit $10 billion through the next fiscal year.
The recently approved state budget provides the city $2.4 billion to help cover migrant costs while the federal government has provided little financial support.
Well-heeled home shoppers are increasingly paying cash, helping turbocharge price gains for the most expensive U.S. homes.
The median sale price of luxury homes — valued in the top 5% of the market nationally — hit an all-time high $1.23 million in the first quarter, an increase of 8.7% from the same period last year, according to an analysis by Redfin. That's almost twice the increase seen in non-luxury homes.
For homes valued in the middle-third of the market, the median sale price rose 4.6% from a year ago to $345,000, according to the report. Redfin didn't factor in price trends for homes with an estimated value in the bottom third of the market.
One reason for the diverging sales data is that wealthy home shoppers are more likely to have the financial flexibility to bypass financing hurdles by paying in cash. The trend is helping accelerate the growth in home sale prices among the most high-end homes at a faster clip than less expensive properties.
Consider, some 46.8% of luxury homes were bought entirely with cash in the three months ended February 29, according to Redfin. That's the highest share of all-cash luxury home purchases in at least a decade and it's up from 44.1% from a year earlier.
Prices for the most expensive homes have kept climbing even as the inventory of high-end properties has increased sharply this year. All told, the number of luxury homes on the market jumped 12.6% in the first quarter compared to a year earlier, while new listings surged nearly 19%, Redfin said.
In contrast, the inventory of homes in the middle-third of the market fell 2.9% in the January-March period from a year earlier. Home prices are growing more unaffordable for the average American, in part because inventory has been low.
Homeowners have been hesitant to sell because they would then face buying another property at today's higher mortgage rates. Some homeowners have also watched their home equity grow in value, making them even more reluctant to walk away from that wealth growth.
Sales of luxury homes rose 2.1% in the first quarter versus a year earlier, while sales of properties in the middle-third of the market fell 4.2%, according to the report.
America's largest and, for some owners, only option for a home insurer is pulling back its operations in the state of California,leaving many with no more options to secure their property's value amid wildfire danger in the state reaching new heights.
As Statista's Katharina Buchholz reports, after saying in May of last year that it wasn't giving out any new California contracts, news broke in March that 72,000 State Farm policies in the state would not be renewed.
Now, a filing shows which zip codes these homes are in.
In many affected places, State Farm had been the only or only major insurer still operating,according to reporting by CBS. Most companies had already deemed the locations uninsurable due to the danger of wildfires whose flames have been fanned by climate change.
Among the zip codes in question are many wealthy neighborhoods in the hillsides in or near Los Angeles, for example Pacific Palisades, Bel Air or Calabasas. Others, like Brentwood or Tarzana, also include more modest stretches.
However, the policies most likely to be discontinued are for those homes in hilly areas more likely to come at a premium in or near big metros but also more likely to fall victim to a fire.
Still, State Farm's move speaks volumes to homes in wooded areas of California now being considered so likely to be destroyed that the usual calculations of insurance companies have stopped working out - at least for those high-end properties that are now having their contracts discontinued.
Home insurance policies are usually renewed every year. In the L.A. zip codes with the biggest shares of contracts that will not be rolling over, between 542 (in Tarzana) and 1,626 policies (in Pacific Palisades) are now running out.
The highest absolute number, however, is in the 94563 zip code of Orinda near Oakland. Other highly affected zip codes are near San Diego as well as in Santa Marta north of the Bay Area.
Launched in 2017, Saudi Arabia’s NEOM, a sprawling high-tech development on the northwestern Red Sea coast, was introduced as the crown jewel of Vision 2030. This futuristic desert megaproject, extending over some Jordanian and Egyptian territory, was cast as a bold leap toward economic diversification under the leadership of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS). But, recent geopolitical setbacks have raised significant concerns about the viability of some of NEOM's components.
Initially celebrated for its revolutionary design, The Line, a linear city within NEOM, was to redefine urban living. Yet, recent reports suggest a dramatic scaling back. Earlier this month, Bloomberg revealed a massive reduction in the metropolis’ scope – from 105 to 1.5 miles – and a decrease in likely inhabitants from 1.5 million to fewer than 300,000 by 2030. Furthermore, funding uncertainties and workforce reductions indicate a project in jeopardy.
While this adjustment does not signify a wholesale failure of Vision 2030, it does prompt a re-evaluation of the project’s most ambitious elements.
Experts suggest that The Line’s original scale was overly optimistic, lacking the necessary urban infrastructure for such an innovative endeavor. Financial and geopolitical challenges, including regional instability and insufficient foreign direct investment, further complicate NEOM’s future.
Not so straight-forward
The drastic downsizing of The Line “appears to be a reassessment of timeline feasibility,” Dr Robert Mogielnicki, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, tells The Cradle. “There are many experimental, world-first dimensions within the NEOM gigaproject, and some are eventually going to need rightsizing or rethinking.”
Also speaking to The Cradle, Dr Kristian Coates Ulrichsen, a Baker Institute Fellow at Rice University, believes the project’s contraction to be a good thing:
Reports that The Line may be scaled back significantly is actually a positive move if it injects greater realism into a project whose initial scale appeared fanciful and difficult to translate into reality. Greater pragmatism in designing and delivering the gigaprojects associated with Vision 2030 is a good thing and means there is a greater likelihood of the projects making it off the drawing board.
Given financial and economic factors, The Line was never feasible as initially presented. Ultimately, the amount of wealth the Saudis generate from oil is not enough to finance the most ambitious of MbS’ Vision 2030 projects. And Riyadh has not been able to lure the levels of foreign direct investment needed to make these extremely expensive vanity projects realizable.
“The vast scope of [The Line] always struck me and many other observers as aspirational rather than realistic,” explains Gordon Gray, the former US ambassador to Tunisia.
Some analysts have pushed back against the recent avalanche of negative media coverage...
Speaking to The Cradle, Ryan Bohl, a Middle East and North African analyst at risk intelligence company RANE, says:
I’d argue that the goals for The Line were unrealistic from the start, given that there’s virtually no urban infrastructure in the area, and it’s very difficult for cities to be started from scratch like that, regardless of the amount of investment poured in. Even if Saudi Arabia had, for example, done something extreme like declare NEOM to be their new capital city, it would still probably struggle to attract residents as we’ve seen from other historical examples like Brazil’s shift of its capital to BrasÃlia.
Nonetheless, The Line and other singular projects had a purpose that was not necessarily about actually implementing the projects themselves. “The point of The Line, in particular, was to create a raison de parler – for people to actually talk about Saudi Arabia, to create a massive public debate globally where people are saying there’s something amazing happening in the desert,” Dr Andreas Krieg, an associate professor at King’s College London, tells The Cradle.
It attracts attention. That sort of discourse – positive or negative – creates a buzz. That buzz was supposed to attract investors who wanted to be a part of this, help Saudi Arabia build a city of the future, and try to do something completely outlandish and absolutely unconventional.
Gaza: a wrench in the works
The leadership in Riyadh has understood that the success of Vision 2030 heavily depends on attracting substantial foreign direct investment into the Kingdom. Ultimately, stability in Saudi Arabia and the wider West Asian region is crucial.
Consequently, Riyadh’s recent foreign policy has been less ideological, focusing instead on maintaining amicable terms with all major players in West Asia to advance Saudi business, commercial, and economic interests.
Therefore, beyond financial and economic constraints that require a reassessment of the most ambitious Vision 2030 projects, such as The Line, Israel’s brutal six-month war on Gaza and the expansion of that conflict into the Red Sea have created headwinds for Saudi Arabia’s geoeconomic plans.
As Arhama Siddiqa, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Strategic Studies Islamabad, explains to The Cradle:
Given the current instability in the Red Sea region, investors may hesitate to support a large-scale project like NEOM due to perceived risks. Even if the direct security threat to NEOM is minimal, the overall instability in the area can deter investors from committing substantial resources to a long-term venture. Additionally, the broader [West Asia] conflict further complicates the situation, adding another layer of uncertainty. Addressing these security concerns could require Saudi Arabia to allocate more resources to regional security measures, potentially diverting funds from the NEOM project.
There is no denying that Saudi Arabia’s economic diversification agenda is vulnerable to naval operations in the Red Sea. NEOM and other Red Sea projects require vessels to be able to freely travel from the Gulf of Aden through the Bab al-Mandab and up to Saudi Arabia’s west coast.
The Gaza war’s potential spillover into this vital waterway continues to raise concerns for Saudi officials about the impact on the Kingdom’s Vision 2030. These dynamics help explain Riyadh’s frustration with the White House for not leveraging its influence over Israel to negotiate a ceasefire in Gaza. It has led to Saudi Arabia’s decision to abstain from joining any US-led security initiatives and military operations in the Red Sea and Yemen.
The Israel–NEOM connection
Israel’s geographic proximity to northwestern Saudi Arabia, its technological advancement, and its vibrant startup culture position the occupation state as a promising partner for Vision 2030 and the NEOM project, particularly in biotechnology, cybersecurity, and manufacturing.
Writing in March 2021, Dr Ali Dogan, previously a Research Fellow at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, went as far as arguing that “relations with Israel are necessary for Saudi Arabia to complete NEOM.”
Dr Mohammad Yaghi, a research fellow at Germany’s Konrad Adenauer Stiftung, similarly stated that NEOM “requires peace and coordination with Israel, especially if the city is to have a chance of becoming a tourist attraction.” However, Saudi Arabia’s leadership role in the Islamic world, exemplified by the monarch’s title as the “Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques,” makes any formal normalization of relations with Tel Aviv highly sensitive.
Initially, it was thought that while the UAE and Bahrain could establish overt relations with Israel, Saudi Arabia would continue to engage covertly, ensuring essential collaborations like those rumored in the tech sector could progress discreetly.
An example being in June 2020, when controversy arose over Saudi Arabia’s alleged engagement with an Israeli cybersecurity firm, which the Saudi embassy later denied.
Yet, almost seven months into Israel’s campaign to annihilate Gaza, can Saudi Arabia still look to Tel Aviv as a partner in NEOM? It appears that amid ongoing crises in the region, chiefly the Gaza genocide, Riyadh must be careful to avoid being seen as cooperating with the Israelis in covert ways, and full-fledged normalization seems off the table for the foreseeable future.
Nonetheless, after the dust settles in Gaza and the Red Sea security crisis calms down, Saudi Arabia will likely maintain its interest in fostering ties with Israel as part of an “economic normalization” between the two countries. This could be important to Vision 2030’s future, particularly in NEOM. But Israel’s unprecedented military campaign in Gaza will likely alter West Asia in many ways for decades to come. Even after the current war in Gaza is over, anger toward Israel and the US will continue.
Without a doubt, the Israeli–NEOM connection will be increasingly sensitive and controversial, both in the Kingdom and the wider region – a factor that the leadership in Riyadh cannot dismiss.
Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been ghetto-ized.
Consider the defining characteristics of a ghetto:
1. The residents can't afford to live elsewhere.
2. Everything is a rip-off because options are limited and retailers / service providers know residents have no other choice or must go to extraordinary effort to get better quality or a lower price.
3. Nothing works correctly or efficiently. Things break down and aren't fixed properly. Maintenance is poor to non-existent. Any service requires standing in line or being on hold.
4. Local governance is corrupt and/or incompetent. Residents are viewed as a reliable "vote farm" for the incumbents, even though whatever little they accomplish for the residents doesn't reduce the sources of immiseration.
5. The locale is unsafe. Cars are routinely broken into, there are security bars over windows and gates to entrances, everything not chained down is stolen--and even what is chained down is stolen.
6. There are few viable businesses and numerous empty storefronts.
7. The built environment is ugly: strip malls, used car lots, etc. There are few safe public spaces or parks that are well maintained and inviting.
8. Most of the commerce is corporate-owned outlets; the money doesn't stay in the community.
9. Public transport is minimal and constantly being degraded.
10. They get you coming and going: whatever is available is double in cost, effort and time. Very little is convenient or easy. Services are far away.
11. Residents pay high rates of interest on debt.
12. There are few sources of healthy real food. The residents are unhealthy and self-medicate with a panoply of addictions to alcohol, meds, painkillers, gambling, social media, gaming, celebrity worship, etc.
13. Nobody in authority really cares what the residents experience, as they know the residents are atomized and ground down, incapable of cooperating in an organized fashion, and therefore powerless.
I submit that these defining characteristics of ghettos apply to wide swaths of American life. Ghettos are not limited to urban zones; suburbs and rural locales can qualify as well. The defining zeitgeist of a ghetto is the residents are effectively held hostage by limited options and high costs: public and private-sector monopolies that provide poor quality at high prices.
Daily life is a grind of long waits / commutes, low-quality goods and services, shadow work (work we have to do that we're not paid for that was once done as part of the service we pay for) and unhealthy addictions to distractions and whatever offers a temporary escape from the grind.
We've habituated to being corralled into the immiseration of limited options and high costs; the immiseration and sordid degradation have been normalized into "everyday life." We've lost track of what's been lost to erosion and decay. We sense what's been lost but feel powerless to reverse it. This is the essence of the ghetto-ization of daily life.
Behind the facade of normalization, even high-income lifestyles have been ghetto-ized. But saying this is anathema: either be upbeat, optimistic and positive or remain silent.
What's worse, the ghetto-ization or our inability to recognize it and discuss it openly?
It's not justrecord capital gains taxes that Americans have to look forward to if they choose "4 more years, pause" of the senile occupant in the White House: As Epoch Times' Jeffrey Tucker reports, property taxes are also about to soar.
Below we excerpt from his latest report on where the Biden tax tsunami sill strike next:
There have been very few points of financial solace in the past few years apart from rising financial markets. Part of that has been an incredible increase in home valuations. This comes from inflation, yes, but also from shifts in supply and demand for home purchases. Demand is as it always was but realizing it is another matter.
The problem is on the supply side. In most places around the country, homes are not going on the market at the same and predictable pace they once were. This is for reasons of soaring costs of new mortgages. Many homeowners purchased back when interest rates were absurdly low and negative in real terms, perhaps 2 or 3 percent.
Selling now means paying huge capital gains taxes and then applying for a new mortgage at 7.5 percent. The implications of that seemingly small change are actually gigantic, and making it work without paying drastically more in monthly bills means moving to a cheaper area of the country or downsizing the quality and size of the home.
Rather than make that choice, many homeowners are stuck living right where they are even if they would prefer some other job or home elsewhere. They are frozen in place but, hey, at least these people have homes that they own, right?
Not only that but the valuation that you see on Zillow is going up and up. Yay!
Not so fast. In the United States, you pay property taxes on your home. This reality gives rise to the perennial question: do you really own your home if maintaining that title requires paying huge property taxes on the place annually? If you don’t pay, the house is taken over by the state, period. It feels a bit like renting doesn’t it? Indeed, the difference between renting and owning can get a bit blurry.
Property taxes are the way schools are funded in the United States generally speaking and with some exceptions. Taxes are organized according to school districts, the lines of which are extremely strict. The identical home one street from the next can have a big difference in price based entirely on market perceptions of quality of the schools in the relevant district.
This is a major reason why “school choice,” whereby anyone from any district can attend any other, has never made much progress politically in the United States. It means a tremendous scrambling of ownership valuations. No one wants that.
You pay these taxes whether you use the schools or not and whether or not you even have children at all. That’s what makes them public schools. The public shares in the expense but the reality is that it is not the public but just property owners from one district to another, with subsidies added by state governments and the federal government, plus “booster” organizations formed by parents.
If you are living in a district and stuck in a home because you cannot move due to expense, you are still stuck paying taxes regardless. These are assessed annually based not on the price at which you purchased the home but on the value of the home at present market value. That doesn’t seem fair either. Why should you continue to have to pay more and more in taxes based on valuation that you are not actually seeing in any kind of profit?
You are a sitting duck, forced to cough up whatever the assessors and tax collectors decide you have to pay.
This year alone, we are seeing huge increases in market valuations that are reflected in taxes you have to pay whether you use public schools or not. The taxes on many mid-sized homes in Texas, for example, are going up thousands of dollars right now. The fear in Georgia is so large that some activists have put on the ballot an initiative to cap property taxes to insulate them from market pressures.
Adding to the frustration here is the terrible reality of school closures from 2020–2022. Even if you wanted to use the schools, you could not because the authorities said that there were viruses in the schools that the children would spread and bring home. There was never any evidence at all that schools were uniquely guilty of viral spread but the perception was used as the excuse to force everyone into Zoom school, which taught the kids nothing.
We are now faced with years of learning loss that keeps getting worse, not to mention soaring absenteeism. The routines of an entire generation were disrupted and not returned to normal.
