(CITYLIMITS.ORG) September 11, 2019

Over 500 residents of the Ozone Park community packed the halls of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary in July of 2018 for a town hall meeting. Rarely do town hall meetings draw huge crowds, but this one did. It was called to confront Department of Homeless Services (DHS) officials about a proposed 113-bed men’s shelter on the corner of 101 Avenue and 86 street.

Mayor de Blasio’s plan to open 90 new shelters has been met with fierce opposition in some neighborhoods across the city. Residents cite various reasons for their objection to shelters in their backyard: an anticipated rise in crime, a projected impact on quality of life, a feared fall in property value or sometimes an alleged lack of services for the shelter population.

Perhaps nowhere in the city was the opposition to a proposed shelter more intense than in Ozone Park. Residents showed up in their hundreds to town hall meetings. They held demonstrations and filed a lawsuit. Sam Esposito, a community leader, went on a two-week hunger strike that ended with a trip to the hospital. “There was no other way I could do it. Nobody was listening to us,” says Esposito now. “I felt like I brought light to the situation,” he adds. After the city dropped plans to house mentally ill men as originally intended, the shelter opened its doors early this year.

In 2017, Mayor de Blasio unveiled a multifaceted plan to combat the rise of homelessness in the city. The initiative, titled “Turning the Tide on Homelessness,” pitched a “reimagined shelter strategy” that aims to completely eliminate the city’s use of commercial hotels and privately-owned apartments known as “cluster sites” to shelter the homeless population by opening 90 new homeless shelters and expanding 30 existing ones throughout the five boroughs.

According to DHS, a move away from cluster apartments and commercial hotels will shrink its footprint by 45 percent citywide. The mayor’s plan projects a reduction in the shelter population by 2,500 in the next five years. However, it anticipates an increase in the number of single adults entering shelters by the end of the plan.

As of August 2019, there are 16,313 single homeless adults in the shelter system in New York City. This accounts for approximately 28 percent of the total number of people in the system. Single adults are assigned to different shelters than families. Research shows that, compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have much higher rates of serious mental illness, addiction disorders, and other severe health problems.

Around the city, siting single men’s shelters causes the most controversy. Single men make up 20 percent of the homeless population. Since the mayor announced his Turning the Tide plan for 90 new shelters in February 2017, the city has opened 23 sites and announced 25 others. More than a dozen of those sites have faced some kind of backlash when communities were notified. Eight of them were shelters for men.

Proposed shelters that have faced some kind of backlash include:

• 267 Rogers Avenue, Brooklyn: families with children
• 1173 Bergen Street, Brooklyn: single senior men
• 5731 Broadway, The Bronx: families with children
• 12-18 East 31st Street, Manhattan: adult families
• 158 West 58th Street, Manhattan: single adults that are employed or employable
• 52-34 Van Dam Street, Queens: adult families
• 85-15 101 Avenue,Queens: single men experiencing mental health challenges
• 306 West 94th Street, Manhattan: adult families
• 127-03 20 Avenue, Queens: single men
• 44 Victory Boulevard, Staten Island: families with children
• 97 Wyckoff Avenue, Brooklyn: single men
• 226 Beach 101 Street, Queens: single men
• 2008 Westchester Avenue, The Bronx: single adult men who are employed or employable
• 286 Audubon Avenue, Manhattan: single women
• 535 4th Avenue and 555 4 Avenue, Brooklyn: families with children

A look at some of the battles over where to locate shelters reveals that the goals of the mayor’s plan—locating shelters near the people who need them but also distributing the facilities more fairly around the city, and shifting away from the flawed current system with its reliance on hotels and cluster sites while also supplying the number of beds the city needs each night—do make for a complicated conversation about what’s fair both for communities and for the people who need a place to sleep.

But it is also clear that overblown neighborhood fears create a political environment in which local leaders face risks for supporting a sensible shelter policy. In the middle, but rarely heard amid the uproar, are everyday New Yorkers caught in a crisis.

Source: CityLimits.org