City planning encouraging hotel boom

From Crain's:

A hotel boom that has reached new neighborhoods and manufacturing enclaves is sparking community outrage and a push by City Council members to stop them.

Councilmen in gritty Gowanus, Brooklyn, and Long Island City, Queens, are pushing for a ban on new hotels in those areas, and civic leaders are doing the same in Manhattan neighborhoods such as SoHo, NoHo and Hudson Square. Their efforts could eventually spur a larger push to regulate an industry long allowed to build almost anywhere it wants.

Hotel boom sparks community backlash

The Bloomberg administration remains committed to allowing hotels to build without special approvals in both manufacturing and commercial areas.

"We are aware of concerns about hotels but must balance that against the fact that the hotel industry is an important industry for the city's economy," says a Department of City Planning spokeswoman. "Hotels need to be able to locate where business is conducted, as well as where they can serve demand generated by nearby residential neighborhoods."

Of course they didn't explain why we need so damn many hotels when the ones we have aren't at full occupancy now. The answer is that it's a sneaky way to overdevelop a neighborhood with de facto apartment buildings. They could limit banks on 125th Street in Harlem, so why not limit hotels, too?

BREAKDOWN OF A BOOM

227 HOTELS ARE PLANNED IN NYC
20% FULL SERVICE
63% LIMITED SERVICE
17% BOUTIQUE
________________________

MARKET SNAPSHOT

396 HOTELS IN NEW YORK CITY
67% FULL SERVICE
27% LIMITED SERVICE
7% ECONOMY

Source: Smith Travel Research