The business owner, a 47-year-old Senegalese man named Ebou Sarr who is a longtime resident of the city, said he had welcomed around 74 people – most of them also from Senegal – to stay in the space.
“Units discovered a dangerous living condition with approximately 40 beds on the ground floor and in the cellar,” the New York City Fire Department told reporters.
Firefighters found the secret dwelling, located in the borough of Queens, late Monday after a neighbour complained about a jumble of electric bikes blocking a courtyard.
Such vehicles – which have spread in the city as workers adopt them to drive delivery routes – can pose a safety hazard when poorly maintained, thanks to battery fires which have already killed several people in New York in recent months.
Sarr said he wanted to help the migrants, many of whom have nowhere else to go as the city’s aid programs strain to provide for tens of thousands of new arrivals.
“We have a lot of people who came to this country, to New York, too, and they needed help,” Sarr told local media.
“They throw them outside in this cold weather and they don’t have no way to go nowhere,” he added, referring to the limited amount of time the city provides shelter for migrants.
New York, where a longstanding housing crisis worsened in the wake of the pandemic and subsequent inflation, is also facing an influx of asylum seekers who cross the US-Mexico border and flock to the iconic metropolis.
The city has commandeered hotel rooms and constructed emergency lodging to provide space for more than 160,000 migrants since the spring of 2022, with some 68,000 of them still relying on city housing as of last month.
But amid the influx, authorities have tightened regulations to limit single adults to 30 days of accommodation and families to 60 days, after which they must reapply to stay.
“What we discovered last night in some ways is also symptomatic of a larger crisis that this city is facing, that we’ve talked about repeatedly, in terms of the housing shortage in this city,” Deputy Mayor for Housing Maria Torres-Springer told local media.