Earlier this month, a modified school bus pulled up in front of a hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and a standoff began.

The bus was there to take homeless New Yorkers away.

Those who knew it would be happening had dreaded this moving day at the four points on 40th Street.

It was a temporary home for the last year for dozens of men.

These men, they'd been living in this hotel, rent-free, courtesy of the city, for more than a year,

all part of a program to help stop the spread of COVID

by keeping them out of congregate shelters.

Now that infection rates are down, and vaccines are available,

the city has been trying to move these men,

and some have refused to go.

I work hard, and all I ask for is affordable housing.

For some of New York's unhoused, social distancing has come with an unanticipated upside,

key cards and cable TV and private bathrooms and hotels that were suddenly empty of tourists.

It is not hard to imagine why they wouldn't want to leave.

I definitely spoke with many people who reported that being in a hotel gave them greater peace

of mind. They weren't as worried about, you know, getting sick from the virus,

but they also felt like they had more privacy to just be a human being and to get their life

back on track in whatever way seems most appropriate for them.

Jacqueline Simone is a senior policy analyst for the Coalition for the Homeless, a court-appointed monitor of the shelter system in New York.

She says it's hard for a person who has not experienced homelessness to imagine just how big an impact this relocation program had.

One thing that so many of us take for granted during this pandemic is access to Wi-Fi. And many of the congregate

shelters in the city don't have Wi-Fi, but many of the hotels do. So I know some people who were able

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