By:  Don Driggers

On Wednesday, developers announced to The New York Post that a 2021 state tourism program aimed at easing the process of converting hotels into housing would finally be utilized, the New York Times first reported.

Jamaica Queens’ Hilton New York JFK Airport, at 144-02 135th Ave., has been selected as the first hard-times hotel to be transformed from short- to long-term residential. Once complete, the $150 million redevelopment is slated to feature 300 units, according to the Times. Advocates of the pandemic-era program argue that this method of turning existing inns into apartments will prove more efficient than building new housing.

“We have to add more units than we’ve ever done,” commented David Schwartz of Slate Property Group, one of the developers set to be involved in the conversion, according to the Times. “We have to make the pie bigger.”

The nonprofit Riseboro Community Partnership and MSquared are also on the project’s development team. Between renovating the hotel rooms and adding heating systems, developers told The New York Post that they anticipate the Hilton’s former rooms being rentable as permanent housing within two years.

Gov. Kathy Hochul called the announcement an “important step” for meeting the needs of New Yorkers who are “counting on their elected officials to do something about the housing crisis.”

The 207,000-square-foot Hilton in question, one of two by the international airport, is being sold by the hotel developer Sam Chang after a dive in foreign tourism hurt business beyond repair, Crain’s reported.

According to a layoff notice found by The New York Post that was posted on the state Labor Department’s website in March, the 12-story business is set to lay off all 125 of its workers and permanently close on June 1.

A recent report by The New York Times states that other places, notably California, moved relatively quickly to turn thousands of hotel rooms into homes during the pandemic. But in New York, the program has been widely panned. Developers claimed it would not do enough to help them overcome onerous regulations, and that the $200 million attached to the program was not enough to compensate for development costs on a large scale.

But supporters of the concept hope the announcement on Wednesday of the roughly $150 million conversion of the Hilton near Kennedy International Airport will show how such projects — quicker and cheaper than building new apartment buildings — can be an effective way of adding more affordable housing in New York.

About $48 million of the $150 million will come from the state program, initially created in 2021 by the Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act.