How We Measured Hotel Stays
To track temporary housing recipients placed in hotels, New York Focus and ProPublica used data obtained from the New York Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance through an open records request. The data contains 1.1 million payments issued from April 2017 to September 2024 for emergency shelter stays outside New York City. OTDA repeatedly delayed releasing the data for 10 months but finally did so after ProPublica’s attorneys got involved in the appeals process.
The data classified payments by type of shelter, including family shelters, transitional housing and hotels. It also included an “emergency shelter” category for temporary housing assistance provided before a case is fully approved, which can flow to both hotels and shelters.
Our analysis includes only payments explicitly classified as hotel payments. We excluded some payments that were classified as hotel payments but where the recipients appeared to be nonprofits that operated homeless shelters.
The data also included unique IDs for each assistance case that received shelter, allowing us to determine how many people stayed in hotels and for about how long. Each case represents either an individual or a family.
To find hotels that housed mostly welfare recipients, New York Focus and ProPublica relied on each hotel’s total number of rooms reported to the New York State Department of Health and checked whether shelter payments covered at least half of the hotel’s total capacity from April 1, 2023, to March 31, 2024.
The data listed the start and end date for each payment, but it was not always clear whether the stay was inclusive or exclusive of the final date. As a result, we chose to exclude the final night whenever counting up dates to create the most conservative estimates possible, unless the payment covered a single night. When comparing the payments against fair market rent, we included the final night, which would decrease the daily rate.
Hotels used to house homeless families outside New York City must be inspected by counties once every six months. After that, the district has 30 days to submit the report to OTDA for review.
OTDA provided a database of inspections for hotels as of Oct. 15, 2024. To determine whether a hotel was past due on inspection, we checked whether the most recent inspection was completed and submitted to OTDA in the seven months leading up to that date. In some cases, the inspection may have been conducted but was not submitted to the state on time.