“What’s Happening Staten Island?” is a series about construction projects and other community happenings around the borough.

STATEN ISLAND, N.Y. —Port Richmond has become New York City’s newest tourist hotspot — or so it would seem.

Developers are in the process of erecting a second hotel along Port Richmond Avenue, less than 200 yards from where one has been in operation since last year .

The presence of the hotels has raised suspicions in Port Richmond where a local civic group, the Port Richmond North Shore Alliance, has kept tabs on the two Port Richmond Avenue sites.

Its leader, Mario Buonviaggio, said Wednesday that the group’s concern is that the hotels could someday be turned into city homeless shelters.

“What we object to is the perception of a building going up as a hotel and never coming to fruition and ultimately being turned over as a possible shelter,” he said.

Port Richmond North Shore Alliance, formerly known as Port Richmond Strong, formed in 2018 after the Advance/SILive.com broke news about plans for the hotel at 109 Port Richmond Ave.

On March 11, Buonviaggio became heated at a Community Board 1 meeting after presenting his concerns.

Ownership for that site traces to Japrindal Sandhu, who has a residence in Nassau County, according to business records from the New York Department of State .

However, the Advance/SILive.com reported in 2020 that the hotel under construction at 109 Port Richmond Ave. and the other at 37 Port Richmond Ave. were both the work of Amritpal Sandhu.

An individual by that name is listed as an owner of 109 Port Richmond Ave. on construction filings with the city Department of Buildings .

Property records from the Richmond County Clerk’s Office for 37 Port Richmond Ave. also list the same owners' address as the Department of State records for 109 Port Richmond Ave. Purchases for both properties were finalized within days of each other in March 2017.

Both properties have been linked to the Sandhu Group, which did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.

The Nassau County-based commercial real estate company has drawn the ire of communities around the five boroughs for its association with the city’s practice of turning hotels into homeless shelters.

In 2021 , Assembly Member William Colton (D-Brooklyn) took the company to task after it bought property in the Bath Beach section of his district.

“This developer is in the business of buying properties and building hotels where a building of a hotel makes no sense, except that it then rents its small rooms to the city, at outrageous rates, to house the homeless in cubicles that do not serve their best interests,” he said at the time.

Ultimately, Sandhu did not build a shelter at that location, and the location at 37 Port Richmond Ave. is currently functioning as a hotel.

During his 12-year administration, former Mayor Michael Bloomberg made it a lucrative practice to use hotels as homeless shelters with locations popping up around the city, and owners reaping millions in city contracts.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio wound down hotel shelters with the last site closing at the end of 2021, but the migrant crisis brought more than 200,000 people to the five boroughs prompting Mayor Eric Adams' administration to reopen such locations.

Between 2022 and 2023 the Sandhu Group purchased three Travis hotels that the city used as migrant shelters. As the migrant crisis has subsided in recent months, Adams' administration has begun to shutter some of its emergency shelter locations, including one of the Travis sites .

While Adams has not made a full return to the use of hotel shelters for the city’s traditional homeless population, there’s nothing preventing a new mayoral administration from doing so.

The Port Richmond Avenue locations are both legally-built as hotels, and Buonviaggio said Wednesday that he hopes they remain that way.

“We’re trying to make it succeed as a civic, you know, trying to promote [it],” he said.

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