Your query is completely wrong. You should use a proper tax_query. Also note, your query is quite expensive to run to just count posts. Set the fields paremeter to only return post ID’s. This saves up to 99.9% on resources.
Just a note, the field parameter inside a tax_query is important. The valid values are slug, term_id and name. This value must correspond with the value passed to the terms parameter. So, if fields are set to slug, you must pass the term slug to terms. Do not use the name parameter, there is a bug in the WP_Tax_Query class where the query fails if a term’s name consists of more than one word.
You can try the following
$args = array(
'post_type' => 'accommodations',
'no_paging' => true, // Gets all posts
'fields' => 'ids', // Gets only the post ID's, saves on resources
'tax_query' => array(
array(
'taxonomy' => 'location', // Taxonomy name
'field' => 'slug', // Field to check, valid values are term_id, slug and name
'terms' => 'new-york' // This value must correspond to field value. If slug, use term slug
)
),
);
$the_query = new WP_Query( $args );
echo $the_query->found_posts;