{"id":22285691,"count":71,"description":"During his 25 years in New York City, Sam Chang has become one of the most prolific hotel builders in the five boroughs. By his own count, Chang has opened at least 70 hotels since the late 1990s, The Wall Street Journal reported. \r\n\r\nHe told the paper in December of 2019 that he planned to <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/end-of-an-era-as-new-yorks-budget-hotel-king-calls-it-quits-11558436400\">retire<\/a> from the hotel business in order to focus on his childhood hobby: pigeon racing. At the time, he blamed the zoning change that required a special permit approval to build hotels in industrial zones. \u201cThey are pretty much putting me out of business,\u201d he told the Journal. \u201cThat rezoning put me in my retirement.\u201d\r\n\r\nAs of early 2021, the city was moving forward with a similar change that would require the same kind of permit\u2014which requires a public land-use process and City Council approval\u2014to build a hotel anywhere. It came in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, which decimated tourism and devastated the city\u2019s hospitality industry, forcing dozens of hotels to close their doors. \r\n\r\nChang, meanwhile, sold off properties. His McSam Hotel Group sold a 531-key hotel at 140 West 28th Street for $147 million in October 2020, and then unloaded a nearly complete Pestana Hotel at 338 West 39th Street in December of the same year for $31.5 million. \r\n\r\nBorn in Taipei in 1960, Chang emigrated to the U.S. and dropped out of high school at 17 to help his parents manage a motel they owned in Los Angeles. He bought his first Chinese restaurant in the Baltimore suburbs in 1979, and he ended up opening and selling <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wsj.com\/articles\/end-of-an-era-as-new-yorks-budget-hotel-king-calls-it-quits-11558436400\">30 restaurants<\/a> by 1983, according to the Journal. He tired of the restaurant business and used profits from selling off the eateries to buy his first hotel in Hagerstown, Md. \r\n\r\nAfter a decade or so running hotels in the suburbs, he bought his first development site in New York City in the city in 1997. Since then, he has helped pioneer the budget hotel industry in New York, cutting costs by buying midblock sites and shrinking room sizes to as small as 150 square feet. \r\n","link":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/tag\/sam-chang\/","name":"Sam Chang (71)","slug":"sam-chang","taxonomy":"post_tag","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags\/22285691","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/post_tag"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?tags=22285691"},{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/print_issue?tags=22285691"},{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/video?tags=22285691"},{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/webinars?tags=22285691"},{"href":"https:\/\/commercialobserver.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/white_papers?tags=22285691"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}