City Councilwoman Julie Menin is close to lining up a veto-proof majority for a bill to cripple Gotham’s hotel industry, and so slam tourism as New York still struggles to recover from the pandemic.
Her obvious motive: lining up the support of the powerful hotel unions for her coming bid to become council speaker.
Never mind that the “Safe Hotel Act” would drive up room rates and displace nonunion workers, mostly minority immigrant women.
It would require hotels to obtain operating licenses every year, ban them from contracting out critical services and require them to directly employ only unionized workers.
Vijay Dandapani, president of the Hotel Association of New York City, likens it to a “nuclear bomb” that “will destroy a major segment of the industry.”
This follows other HTC-inspired anti-tourism laws: banning nearly all AirBnB rentals in the city, for one.
And, two years ago, mandating special permits to build a new hotel.
Since then, no one’s filed a single application to do so: The union can count on preventing any new non-unionized hotels, and nobody’s interested in opening one that’ll be under the HTC’s thumb.
Now the drive is to outlaw any nonunion job at any hotel, which guarantees at least some closures and sets up the HTC to dictate to the entire industry, forever.
Menin pretends it’s an anti-crime measure, yet neither NYPD stats nor 911 complaints show any reason to fear hotel-centered crime.
Indeed, any hotel that wants to stay in business is vigilant on that front.
(And it’s not as if organized crime hadn’t been taking over US unions for decades — not that that’s the only way unions get corrupted.)
Yes, the Police Benevolent Association now backs the bill, but the obvious explanation is that the PBA and the HTC are both clients of the same lobbying shop, Pitta Bishop.
Billionaire hoteliers must be held accountable, Menin dog-whistles. But most hotel owners aren’t billionaires; these days they’re largely South Asian entrepreneurs investing in outerborough properties.
To be clear, the hotel industry is no angel: It was all-in on banning its own competition from AirBnB and other short-term rentals.
But the upshot of all this is that it’s getting prohibitively expensive for anyone but the rich (or those willing to stay on a friend’s couch) to visit the city for fun.
And that’s poison for Broadway, museums, restaurants and the rest of the hospitality industry; it’s even bad for non-high-end retailers.
The entire City Council is quickly becoming nothing but a way for ideologues and special interests to make this town less livable for ordinary folks.
And that Menin is pushing this particular toxic measure to vault herself into leading the council is just added proof of how fundamentally corrupt the city’s Legislature has grown.