For those willing to take up the government's offer to pay you to allow migrants to stay in your home ...
The hotel guest who wouldn’t leave
Mickey Barreto’s five-year stay cost him only $200.57. Now it might cost him his freedom.
By Matthew Haag, New York Times Service
updated on March 27, 2024 | 10:23 AM
NEW YORK — On a June afternoon in 2018, a man named Mickey Barreto checked into the New Yorker Hotel. He was assigned Room 2565, a double-bed accommodation with a view of midtown Manhattan almost entirely obscured by an exterior wall. For a one-night stay, he paid $200.57.
But he did not check out the next morning. Instead, he made the once-grand hotel his full-time residence for the next five years, without ever paying another cent.
In a city where every inch of real estate is picked over and priced out, and where affordable apartments are among the rarest commodities, Barreto had perhaps the best housing deal in New York City history. ...
... Much of Barreto’s story is corroborated by years of court records, but one crucial moment comes from only his account: On that first night, he settled into his room, high above midtown, with his partner, Matthew Hannan. Before that night, Barreto says, Hannan had mentioned, in passing, a peculiar fact about affordable-housing rules that pertain to New York City hotels.
With their laptops open, he claimed, they explored whether the New Yorker Hotel was subject to a little-known section of a state housing law, the Rent Stabilization Act.
Passed in 1969, the law created a system of rent regulation across the city. But also subject to the law was an assortment of hotel rooms, specifically those in large hotels built before 1969, whose rooms could be rented for less than $88 a week in May 1968.
According to the law, a hotel guest could become a permanent resident by requesting a lease at a discounted rate. Any guest-turned-resident also had to be allowed access to the same services as a nightly guest, including room service, housekeeping and the use of facilities, such as the gym.
The room becomes, essentially, a rent-subsidized apartment inside a hotel. ...
