The 41-floor New Yorker Hotel on Eighth Avenue in New York City has 912 rooms. That's only one room short of what it would take to house the 913 New Yorkers still living in hotels in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
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New York City has been trying to wrap up its housing program for some time. Earlier today, the New York Supreme Court ruled that the city had to keep providing housing for victims of the storm beyond the May 31 deadline it had set, according to the Wall Street Journal. When that date was set, the residents sued, saying "they had received little assistance and few housing options from unprepared caseworkers" and "the city had given inadequate termination notices and failed to advise them of their rights to protest the evictions."
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There are conflicting reports of how many people have been in the program over time. (New York's is one of several that have existed; FEMA, for example, had its own transition program.) Based on various news reports and today's court filing, we've put together this estimate of the number of households in New York's program over time.
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The increase in February was the result of additions to the program as the weather grew colder.
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The 913 figure is down substantially from the last time the city tried to end the program. When it announced an end-of-April deadline, there were some 2,000 people still needing to be housed — a figure too large for any one New York City hotel to accommodate.
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Photo: The New Yorker Hotel, by saucysalad on Flickr.com.
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