![\"Placeholder\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/10\/placeholder.png\")
<\/p>\nThe new owner of a 50-story hotel in New York City’s Financial District has turned the building into student housing just months after acquiring it.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n The former Holiday Inn at 99 Washington St. in Manhattan is being converted to student housing.\n <\/p>\n
Los Angeles-based real estate firm\u00a0Hawkins Way Capital<\/a>\u00a0paid $155M in July to buy the 485-foot-tall building\u00a0at 99 Washington St. out of bankruptcy. It opened in 2014 as the world’s tallest Holiday Inn<\/a>\u00a0before closing during the pandemic and being used as a migrant shelter<\/a>.<\/p>\n But after the sale this summer, Hawkins Way subsidiary Found Study FiDi enlisted adaptive reuse specialist BDB Construction to convert the 492-key hotel into a 650-bed student dormitory. The first phase of that conversion is now complete, BDB announced Wednesday.\u00a0<\/p>\n Nearby institutions include\u00a0Pace University<\/a>, the New York Film Academy and The King\u2019s College. The building could also pull students from the\u00a0City University of New York,\u00a0Baruch College, Hunter College and\u00a0New York University<\/a>, BDB CEO Tallal Bhutta told\u00a0Bisnow\u00a0by email.<\/p>\n BDB is also converting an adjacent chapel into amenities and has added new finishes, cabinetry and fixtures to all the building\u2019s rooms and common areas.<\/p>\n The rapid pace of construction means that the building\u2019s owners can start moving in students already and generating\u00a0revenue, Bhutta said in a statement. The firm\u00a0expects to complete the construction by the start of the fall 2026 semester.<\/p>\n \n Courtesy of BDB Construction\/Erik Rank\n <\/p>\n \n One of the new dorm rooms inside 99 Washington St., a former Holiday Inn hotel in FiDi.\n <\/p>\n \u201cConverting the hotel tower at 99 Washington St. into student residences is being completed in two discrete phases, so they achieved occupancy for about half of the 650 planned beds before this fall semester started,\u201d\u00a0Bhutta said.<\/p>\n While BDB said in its release that the property is now the tallest student housing accommodation in the world, it will likely soon lose that crown. While it is taller than the Guinness World Record holder<\/a>, the 367-foot\u00a0Nido Spitalfields in London, a 190-meter (623-foot) dorm, is set to open in Leeds, UK<\/a>, next year.<\/p>\n The Holiday Inn property was\u00a0developed by<\/a>\u00a0a partnership\u00a0of\u00a0Sam Chang<\/a>\u00a0and Jubao Xie,\u00a0then Xie\u00a0bought out Chang\u2019s stake three years after completion. The developer listed the hotel\u00a0for $300M\u00a0but struggled to find a buyer.<\/p>\n Then the pandemic set in, prompting a foreclosure battle that pushed the property into bankruptcy in 2022. A bankruptcy judge approved a contract with the city\u00a0for the hotel to act as a\u00a0migrant shelter<\/a>\u00a0in 2023, but when its\u00a0contract wasn\u2019t renewed<\/a>\u00a0last year,\u00a0Xie’s affiliate \u2014 which had been taken over by Philadelphia-based GF Hotels & Resorts \u2014 sold the building to Hawkins Way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The new owner of a 50-story hotel in New York City’s Financial District has turned the building into…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":38455,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[22464,10926,22465,9,24,63,22463,22460,22461,122,124,123,22462,22459],"class_list":{"0":"post-38454","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-queens","8":"tag-hawkins-way-capital","9":"tag-holiday-inn","10":"tag-manhattan-fidi","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-city","13":"tag-nyc","14":"tag-nyc-hotels","15":"tag-nyu","16":"tag-pace-university","17":"tag-queens","18":"tag-queens-headlines","19":"tag-queens-news","20":"tag-sam-chang","21":"tag-student-housing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38454","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38454"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38454\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/38455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38454"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38454"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38454"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n