Add The New York Post on Google A luxury Upper East Side hotel has spent years serving as a quiet homeless shelter, and neighbors say the city cut them out of the loop entirely.
The Bentley Hotel, a 21-story tower at 500 E. 62nd St. where rooms once fetched more than $200 a night, is housing 197 people under a taxpayer-funded contract, according to Highland Park Community Development Corporation, the Brooklyn nonprofit running the operation, Upper East Site first reported.
It is not the building’s first rodeo as a shelter. The hotel took in homeless New Yorkers displaced from crowded congregate shelters back in May 2020, part of the city’s pandemic-era push to spread people out and slow the spread of COVID-19 inside dorm-style facilities.
The Bentley resurfaced as a shelter in 2023, this time designated a Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Center for asylum seekers arriving amid the migrant crisis, with Highland Park landing a $32 million contract to run it, Upper East Site reported.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani ordered the city’s last remaining HERRC, in The Bronx, be shuttered by the end of this year. Yet the Bentley never closed. It simply got a new label.
Highland Park’s marketing materials now brand the property a “Tier 2 family shelter” called “Yorkville Sanctuary,” even though the building sits in Lenox Hill, not Yorkville. The pitch promises to help residents land on their feet.
“A Tier 2 family shelter, providing a safe and secure environment to families,” the materials read, according to Upper East Site. “The goal of the program is to assist the families in locating affordable housing.”
This has the Upper East Side locals fuming. The Department of Homeless Services has a track record of alerting Community Board 8 when new shelters open nearby, notifying the board about a 92-bed site on East 91st Street and a 200-bed high-rise on First Avenue. The Bentley got no such heads up, Upper East Site found.
Tyler Hollinger, owner of Festivál Café on Second Avenue and a founding member of the East Side Accountability Alliance, said the building’s status was never exactly a mystery to those paying attention.
“We always knew that it was a shelter,” Hollinger told Upper East Site.
He argues the silence from officials fits a pattern.
“It’s very clear that the community board and the government doesn’t really care what the people think, and they’re just going to do whatever they want,” Hollinger said.
Richard Barcia, who lives on East 62nd Street, said he has no beef with the people staying there, just with the city dodging basic disclosure.
“I don’t have anything against these people — I know they need a place to live,” Barcia told the outlet.
He wants the city to come clean rather than let residents piece it together themselves.
“Why don’t they just put that out as a press release and just acknowledge what’s going on?” Barcia said.
Michael Bailey, a member of the East Side Accountability Alliance, accused the city of stonewalling.
“It seems like they’re intentionally misleading us,” Bailey told Upper East Site.
A Department of Social Services spokesperson confirmed migrant-specific shelters have been phased out citywide but would not say what the Bentley is currently being used for, citing confidentiality rules around shelter addresses. The agency stopped short of denying the building is operating as a shelter, and did not answer follow-up questions about the terms of its contract with the hotel or what happened to people who were living there when the migrant program wound down.
Highland Park CDC and the Bentley Hotel did not respond to requests for comment.
