An Athletic Center for the Atlantic Armory?

I don't think it much matters where the idea came from. I would love to see all of the former armories put to good use. When I lived in Bed-Stuy I was constantly pained by the fact that the city (as far as I know, based on pretty good info) was paying for the rehab of the Park Slope Armory, while the Bed-Stuy armory remained unattended. I'd be hard put to advocate the closing of a men's shelter, but the idea of a thriving athletics center that could be freely used by the surrounding residents is appealing.
R.I.P. James

Subject: lets be fair

park slope can use an athletic center in their armory more than crown heights...

its not like they have one of the worlds loveliest and biggest public parks in their immediate area, or plenty of playgrounds or.....

uh nevermind.

I love the idea and agree it needs to be monitored and maintained so we can all use it for a long time. But where will they put all those homeless men?

I'm sorry to hear that some of you have had such negative experiences with the homeless guys at the Atlantic shelter. I have friends that have lived on that block for several years and they have mostly positive experiences with the guys who stay there.

I'm all for increased recreation for youth but not at the expense of putting all those men back out on the street. The city's homeless services don't seem to have any ideas for an alternative way to shelter the men. It's got to be a "win, win" situation that ensures that the needs of both of these at-risk populations are met.

Perhaps our elected officials should first work on making sure our public schools' recreation facilities are open for supervised activitiy during out-of-school time hours. There's a great middle school out in Far Rockaway that has its doors opened in the evenings and on Saturdays. It has a community center model that is having a real impact on the community.

Subject: Re: lets be fair

Anonymous wrote: [quote=Anonymous]park slope can use an athletic center in their armory more than crown heights...

its not like they have one of the worlds loveliest and biggest public parks in their immediate area, or plenty of playgrounds or.....

uh nevermind.

Why would Park Slope be a better fit for an athletic center then Crown Height? Are the people in PS better then the people in CH? Do the children in PS deserve more then the children in CH? I'm not understanding this comment, please explain. I don't want to jump to the wrong conclusion.
It is blatantly tongue-in-cheek, I would say...

Redd wrote: I'm sorry to hear that some of you have had such negative experiences with the homeless guys at the Atlantic shelter. I have friends that have lived on that block for several years and they have mostly positive experiences with the guys who stay there.

I'm all for increased recreation for youth but not at the expense of putting all those men back out on the street. The city's homeless services don't seem to have any ideas for an alternative way to shelter the men. It's got to be a "win, win" situation that ensures that the needs of both of these at-risk populations are met.

Perhaps our elected officials should first work on making sure our public schools' recreation facilities are open for supervised activitiy during out-of-school time hours. There's a great middle school out in Far Rockaway that has its doors opened in the evenings and on Saturdays. It has a community center model that is having a real impact on the community.

A new group calling itself CHaRM (Crown Heighs Revitalization Movement) is forming in Crown Heights to look at, among other things, why Crown Heights seems to have an inordinately high concentration of residential social service programs.

One of the members made a quick calculation based on Dept of Homeless Services and City Planning information, that of 6,000 homeless adults inventoried by the DHS one day last week, 1,000 would end up in beds in Crown Heights. If this is fact an accurate statistic, then I think we've got a pretty good case for moving some of those homeless men to another community.

What do you think?

Moving them like "checker pieces" would actually be part of the fairer solution. NYC has a mandate to house and provide services for the homeless, drug dependents, mentally ill, etc. Which means that they should have built new facilities and upgraded/maintained new facilities as the need arose - and those facilities should have been equitably dispersed across the entire city - all boros and all nabes.

The backdoor/loophole to this policy is that the city will use individual /privately owned service providers to take on a lot of the heavy lifting (housing, treatment,etc.) Those privately owned guys own/rent in CH and other nabes because it’s cheaper moneywise to do so and because there's less organized resistance/awareness to their business plan.

As a result - NYC gets to not have to deal with a lot of the hassle of providing shelter and treatment to a bunch of its citizens - whole zip codes have ZERO beds devoted to housing/treating its neediest citizens (Upper East side and elsewhere) - poorer nabes (like CH and locally) house an overwhelming majority of these citizens.

It’s a known and acknowledged fact that the Dep of Corrections directly drops off its recent releasees at the Bedford Armory (about 500 beds last I checked). Directly across the street on Pacific there's another center that has about a 100 beds. CHM (I think that's their name..) has how many treatment centers in the nabe? Another center catering to mentally ill and drug/alcohol dependent adults was built on Prospect Place right next to a daycare center about a year ago.

Two options - Either the whole city and their respective zip code takes it fair share of the burden (which means moving them around), OR....

Make CH and such nabes the defacto Housing/Treatment areas for the entire city. Times Square is all Broadway shows and nightlife - Fifth Avenue Manhattan all boutique shops and millionaires - Crown Heights beds and treats every released con, homeless family, addict, mentally ill person who lives in or moves into NYS and NYC.

Just ramp up our police activity and presence dramatically to account for the influx of poor and troubled people with no permanent links to the nabe - give us better street lighting - give us more, better and more secure parks for our children to play under some sort of supervision (as the streets are now filled with the above mentioned newcomers) and a bunch of other stuff that I can't think of right now - but something to compensate us for being turned into the city's dumping ground of social ills that it rather not deal with.

When people move to Crown Heights North and wonder why there are so many people hanging out, part of the answer may be in that many of these people were placed here by the city as part of various social service programs.

Of course this large population of folks living in supportive housing are not contributing a lot to the community. They have little disposable income, don't attend block association meetings, don't get involved in civic groups and generally frighten away folks that do.

We should definitely take our fair share but enough is enough.

What we need is a mandate from the Mayor or City Council that every community board district manager or some city agency conduct a census of ALL residential social service programs, both public and private, in each community board. Until that is done, we just be talking to ourselves.