Shelter planned at 1173 Bergen (near NY Ave)

According to CB8 and Cornegy's office, the Nostrand/Atlantic one just opened in the "new" hotel on the north side of Atlantic! WHO KNEW?!

The Bedford-Atlantic Armory Men’s Shelter is already the largest shelter for single men IN THE CITY. The New York Times describes it as "notorious for crime, loitering and panhandlin."; then there's the Nostrand/Atlantic one block away;  now the new proposed shelter would be two blocks away.  They're creating a corridor from Atlantic to Bergen, Bedford to New York, a four block area.  Crown Heights is already oversaturated with shelters as well as other social services, such as halfway houses and rehab clinics; they should be spread more evenly throughout the city to avoid exactly this kind of over-saturation in under-resourced communities​. ​ Bill de Blasio’s Homelessness Plan in fact segregates the homeless into areas already saturated with homeless people.

Councilman Robert Cornegy (Bed Stuy & Crown Heights) and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, both told the mayor to his face that they oppose the Bergen shelter at a recent town hall in Bed Stuy. They're both lifelong neighborhood residents and our local elected representatives.
Cornegy also showed up at last night's CB8 meeting to voice his objection.

There's a petition circulating, please read and sign if you support: https://www.change.org/p/bill-de-blasio-stop-crown-heights-20th-shelter-from-opening-bergen-house-homeless-shelter-for-104-men
and share with friends, neighbors and your block associations.
[note: there's another hand-written petition with hundreds more signatures for the less-socially-connected]

My guess is that the Nostrand/Atlantic site is the La Quinta Inn at 1229 Atlantic. It is probably part of the 436-room expansion in the city's homeless hotel portfolio that is the subject of this NYT article: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/07/nyregion/homelessness-new-york-city-hotels.html

I’m sympathetic to the oversaturation argument, but if those of you who oppose this shelter succeed and get the City to put it in some other community, where do you think it will go? Park Slope? Boerum Hill? No way. It will end up in Brownsville or Canarsie. My guess is that you wouldn’t care either way so long as it’s not here.

The fact is shelters will go where the real estate is cheaper. A property the size of 1173 Bergen would cost two or three times as much in Gowanus or DUMBO. I’d rather see the City spend the limited dollars budgeted for homeless services on helping more homeless people rather than buying real estate in expensive areas. If that means my community has to cope with a few hundred more human beings in distress, so be it. I for one will welcome them. I’m saddened to see that many of my neighbors will not.

@RadGirl Thank you for the walk down memory lane. I don't reread my old Brooklynian posts as often as I should. It’s true that I don’t go walking around the neighborhood scouting out sites for new homeless shelters, but perhaps I ought to. 

I agree that oversaturation is a problem, though Crown Heights is by no means the most oversaturated community in the City. I assume that this is why you lump Bedford-Stuyvesant into your talking points in order to goose the numbers. 

I also agree that the City is inept (or worse) at siting new shelters, communicating with the community, and dealing with the homelessness epidemic in general. DHS is non-transparent in its site selection and inarticulate in its community outreach. The fact that just last night they would not disclose the number of beds in the shelters they plan to close is outrageous. That even pissed me off, and I support this thing. However, there is no other entity with a billion dollar budget focused on helping homeless people.

And I also agree that the people who live and work within vicinity of the Bedford-Atlantic shelter suffer numerous quality of life issues and other grievances that the City does not address as well as they should. But not all shelters are alike, and 1173 Bergen is not looking like another Bedford-Atlantic. I lived down the block from the Institute for Community Living facility on St. Marks and Brooklyn for two years and would have never known there was a shelter there if I hadn’t been curious about the building and googled it.

Now, if CORE doesn’t live up to its obligations at 1173 Bergen I’ll gladly join the community in pushing back hard. I’ll also gladly join any effort to push the City to build more supportive and affordable housing on property it owns in CB8 (like at 530-542 Dean Street, as I mentioned in that prior post of mine you dug up). 

I won’t sign your petition, however. I think the magnitude of the current homelessness epidemic requires rapid action, even though that action will of necessity be messy and imperfect and will affect certain communities more than others, for reasons that are complex and unpopular to discuss. That’s reality.

Instead of a “shut it down” posture, I would instead support getting the City to make certain explicit commitments about this and future shelters in Crown Heights. For instance, get them to commit to convert 1173 Bergen into permanent supportive housing once the City's homeless numbers fall from the current 60,000 to a lower benchmark. Or get a commitment from the City to convert the Brower Park library building into affordable housing once the library relocates to the Children's Museum. 

If the City wants to place an extraordinary burden on Crown Heights as it struggles to solve the homelessness epidemic I won't say no. But I would push for the community to receive extraordinary benefits in recompense. 

What I'd like to see in Crown Heights:

Here are numbers, according to NY1:

A number of commenters have posted "placing more burden on this already over-burdened, under-resourced community" like Crown Heights.
What does this mean? Will crown heights be expected to provide much for the shelters? I understand the anxiety around having more shelters or homesless people than other areas, but my understanding is that they're pretty reliant on the city.

Thanks, @faithful813.

I still have a few questions since I'm not completely understanding the conversation here --

A hospital closer doesn't mean it's being taken away. It means it can't support itself and no one is stepping in to fill that role. So I don't see how this plays into the question of Crown Heights not having the resources to support shelters?

Do the homeless need their own affordable housing? I always thought the goal was to help the homeless - and all, really - become self sufficient citizens. Subsidized housing doesn't really check that box.

Also, developers are allowing units for below market rate in exchange for breaks. The tax code that enforced that exchange is what led to all the luxury, high rises we see around us. If we can acknowledge that developers are business people & not the government that functions at a real loss, what role do developers play here?

What resources does crown heights not have but will will have to spend with new shelters?

On the bright side, "undesirable facilities" keep housing prices lower and relatively affordable, right?!

Marco555 said:

On the bright side, "undesirable facilities" keep housing prices lower and relatively affordable, right?!

Exactly!!

whynot_31 said:

That is a bright side if you are a renter or looking for home to buy, but not a bright side if you already own.

Very true. Thanks for pointing out. 

@RadGirl We should reall work on making a map of all known locations for this sort of housing. Presenting a map like this is really powerful.

I think this from the Gothamist article sums it up:

"Desmond Atkins, a lifelong resident of Crown Heights, accused the Department of Homeless Services on Wednesday of continuing a legacy of racial discrimination by opening a men's shelter in his neighborhood—a part of Brooklyn that is majority black and, he believes, already saturated with similar facilities.
'People who look like me, or who speak other languages, typically are placed in neighborhoods and areas that are dumped upon,' said Atkins, who is black. 'This community was redlined when I was a child in the '60s and the '50s... This community should not be a dumping ground.' "

I think Gothamist buried the lede on this story.

DeBlasio’s feel-good arguments about preserving “family” and “community” in the location of new shelters is a red herring. The new shelter on Bergen is taking people from ALL OVER BROOKLYN, not just the immediate neighborhood. There is therefore no reason why the same shelter couldn’t be put in less over-saturated neighborhoods. Rather than doing something new, DeBlasio is perpetuating business as usual: moving poor and troubled men to historically poor communities that lack the political connections and economic strength of other neighborhoods. This just keeps kicking people when they're down.

 

The mayor initially justified locating new shelters in already over-saturated communities by claiming “We were doing the whole thing wrong, just like our predecessors had done the whole thing wrong because there was no reference to community, there was no reference to family.” He continued, “We believe there’s much more chance of people being respected and accepted if they’re close to the neighborhood they come from.”

 

But now DHS has “clarified” that the men at this shelter will be from all of Brooklyn. So, if you are an older man who falls on hard times ANYWHERE in Brooklyn, you can come to “your community” and your “family” in Crown Heights. What a load of crap.

 

DeBlasio should know better. He helped in the semi-successful fight against the Atlantic Armory’s conversion into an intake center for all of NYC by making the same arguments about over-saturation and the Fair Share act. Now, his supposed commitment to preserving “family” and “community” reads more like a bait-and-switch technique.