The first New York City homicide of 2021 occurred on New Year’s Day in Kew Gardens, Queens, at the Umbrella Hotel, which already seemed aptly named, for the cover it provided over a thunderstorm of illegal activity. Throughout the previous summer, people in the neighborhood had complained about shootings, drug use and prostitution at the hotel. Covid was devastating the hospitality industry; rates at the Umbrella had dropped to $80 a night, and rooms were taken by partyers, disruptive often to the point of violence. Five miles away, at an airport motel in July 2020, two teenage girls were held captive and forced to have sex with strangers.

The lawlessness continued even as Covid receded. Last year, Bronx prosecutors indicted several people involved in a child sex trafficking ring that operated out of a hotel on the edges of Soundview, among them the manager, a front desk clerk and a security guard. At the time, the district attorney, Darcel Clark, argued for the regulation of hotels “in a manner where they cannot host criminal activity for years without bearing responsibility.”

Of the 769 hotels in New York City, a vast majority are safe, but it remains a strange facet of local governance that despite the particular vulnerabilities they present, hotels are not subject to the same sort of scrutiny that so many other businesses are. Unlike restaurants, bars, nail salons, newsstands, locksmiths, used-car dealerships, carwashes and even scrap-metal processors, among others, no license is required to run a hotel in a place that attracts tens of millions of visitors a year.

Developers must get building permits, follow zoning rules and demonstrate an adherence to fire codes, but beyond that, oversight is essentially laissez-faire. This is why hotels where chaos reigns, typically far from the center of Manhattan or chic Brooklyn and room-service truffle fries, are so difficult to shut down — why they can “host criminal activity for years without bearing responsibility” — and why it took the murder of a 20-year-old man for the city to finally close the hotel in Kew Gardens.

Neighbors had been bringing grievances to local politicians, who had little recourse. “It was really frustrating,” former Mayor Bill de Blasio, who had been trying to close the hotel for months, told me. He was finally able to do it a few days after the hotel’s most disturbing incident.

“When I went into office, I didn’t have a chart in my mind of what’s city and what is state,” he said, referring to the different jurisdictions under which certain businesses fall, distinctions that can be confusing and arbitrary and allow some industries to fall through the cracks. It was galling to him that it took a death to be able to exercise some authority. “When something becomes a matter of public safety, we need the ability to act,” he said. “Of course there should be due process. But we need the preventive to keep these problems from festering and getting worse.”