On a recent weekday morning, the cafeteria of the Bergen House in Crown Heights, Brooklyn was quiet. Seated around long plastic tables, residents from the 104-bed homeless shelter for senior men played dominoes and chatted. One man built small figurines from wooden tongue depressors. The fluorescent-lit room was mostly bare, save for a few posters, a bulletin board, and a large, multicolored mural.
Eighteen months ago, that freshly painted mural served as the backdrop to a much more raucous scene: a packed public meeting, the first held after news broke that the low-slung beige building, once a daycare, would become a homeless shelter. During the meeting, Crown Heights residents vented their anger and shouted down city officials and shelter representatives for hours.
The Bergen Street shelter was one of the first announced under “Turning the Tide on Homelessness,” Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambitious, five-year plan to revamp the way New York’s shelter system operates. With a long-term goal of reducing the homeless population by 2,500 people (or about four percent of the then-total of 60,000), the plan also aims to end the use of commercial hotels for shelter; shutter all of the city’s shelter units in privately-owned, often far-flung apartments called cluster sites; and replace them with 90 new, purpose-built shelters with on-site supportive services. The idea, the mayor argued, was only fair; get rid of an ad-hoc network of shelter units in favor of high-quality facilities distributed more equitably throughout the boroughs.
In theory, it was a reasonable proposal. In practice, it was a very tough sell. When the city announced three of the first four new shelters would open in the Crown Heights area, backlash was intense. Almost immediately, residents flooded public meetings, called press conferences, and filed lawsuits to stop two of the shelters, including Bergen House, from opening.
One neighbor of that shelter, Fior Ortiz-Joyner, was among those who helped bring a lawsuit against the Bergen House and was one of the most vocal critics of the mayor’s shelter plan, even calling into “The Brian Lehrer Show” on WNYC to grill de Blasio on the initiative during the height of the uproar.
Today, her anger toward the mayor, the homeless services department and how the plan was executed has not dissipated. She feels strongly that low-income and non-white communities “who are less vocal end up getting what no one else wants.”
But, she admits, things on Bergen Street could be a lot worse. The place is well-run and its staff is responsive, she says. And the residents are senior men, many with health issues, and she’s “never felt unsafe, thankfully.”
“No one wants a shelter on their block, but if we have to have one, I think this was the best-case scenario,” she says.
A year and a half into the mayor’s shelter overhaul plan, there’s no doubt opposition continues. Resistance on the famous Billionaires’ Row on East 58th Street in Manhattan is particularly intense over a 150-bed shelter for employed men. In Ozone Park, Queens, residents have threatened to go to court over a proposal for a 113-bed shelter for mentally ill men; one resident there is so against the plan, he went on a hunger strike that ended with a trip to a hospital.
That loud opposition comes amid an ongoing homelessness crisis marked by a stubbornly high shelter system census—the number of homeless people in the city has been climbing for a decade, and has hovered around 60,000 for most of de Blasio’s time in office—and a frightening laundry list of challenges still left to tackle.
But there is another side to the story: Turning the Tide is rolling along—imperfectly and behind schedule, but with some encouraging results for shelter residents, those who work with them, and even some of the people who fought so hard to keep new, homeless neighbors off their blocks.
From the perspective of the Department of Social Services, there’s plenty to be happy about. Since the start of the initiative, the imprint of the shelter system is down by almost a third. The total amount of locations the city uses for shelter of any kind decreased by 28 percent, from 647 locations used a year and half ago to 465 buildings in use now. That includes a 70 percent decrease in cluster sites, from 276 locations to 82 as of late September.
And the total population of homeless people in the shelter system has hit a milestone, of sorts. On a recent shelter tour, Steven Banks, the DSS Commissioner, touted the accomplishment the agency first reported earlier this year: For the first time in over a decade, the number of homeless people in New York City stayed steady year-over-year, plateauing at about 60,000 people between January 2017 and January of this year. (The population of single adults in the system, however, is rising, according to a recent analysis by Politico.)
But there’s still a long way to go, and the city is behind its own schedule.
Originally, the city aimed to open 40 of the 90 new shelters by the end of this year, but that’s unlikely to happen. As of late August, only 21 shelters have been slated to open by DSS, the agency said. Fifteen are up and running, and six have yet to open, including the 58th Street and Ozone Park locations, as well facilities in Far Rockaway, Ward’s Island, and two in the Claremont section of the Bronx. Five of those six are expected to open by year’s end, DSS said, and the last (at 1511 Fulton Avenue in the Bronx) will open in 2020.
Discouragingly, the number of hotel shelters hasn’t budged. In fact, the number of hotel locations used for shelter by the DSS has increased slightly since the beginning of Turning the Tide, from 84 to 89. The cost of sheltering the homeless has also gone up, according to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, a fact the city attributes to its larger investment in services, renovations, repairs and ending “the use of cheaper stopgap measures,” per an agency spokesman.
Though Banks sees early indicators of the plan’s success, he won’t say he’s satisfied with the progress so far. “We’re certainly heading in the right direction, but there’s always more work to do to,” he says. “For many people, they’re feeling the reforms that have been needed for years. For other people, the reforms haven’t reached them and [for] them, we continue to double down every day.”
The most immediately tangible result of the shelter program is, of course, the new shelters. And on a recent tour of the first crop of purpose-built shelters in the Crown Heights area, the facilities that once caused such alarm in the neighborhood appear well-run, clean, and even pleasant.
At a Prospect Heights facility, sunflowers adorn a large bedroom with a bay window overlooking a quiet, tree-lined street. On Rogers Avenue, homeless families live in a newly constructed building with a spacious lobby, kids’ playroom, and nearly floor-to-ceiling windows in each unit. And on Bergen Street, construction is underway for a landscaped rooftop garden.
Inside, residents have a library, laundry room, and good food, according to 64-year-old resident Ronald Hicks. He said he lost a few pounds while trying to find a permanent place to live last year, but since moving to Bergen House in the spring, he says he regained that weight—and has to be careful not to put on extra. “Whatever they cook, I’ll eat it,” he says.
The place has such “a nice atmosphere,” Hicks thought it was a senior center when he first arrived. It would be an easy mistake to make, what with the shelter’s full calendar of friend-making workshops, game nights, arts and crafts sessions, and day trips. In the dormitories, each bed is neatly made with identical yellow blankets, brown sheets and dark blue pillows.
“We definitely promote the bed-making,” says Bergen House’s director, Sabrina Soto, as she walked through the facility’s brightly lit halls.
Though Soto is primarily concerned with what goes on inside the shelter, run by Core Services Group, she also has her eye on how the shelter is meshing with the neighborhood. She encourages clients to get to know their neighbors, nudging them to help with local gardening projects (they helped Ortiz-Joyner with a bulb-planting event last fall), attend precinct meetings, and go to barbecues and block parties. “My staff takes them,” Soto says. “They take chairs and they go and hang out.”
And the neighbors are encouraged to get to know the shelter, too. Under the Turning the Tide plan, each shelter has a Community Advisory Board (CAB), made up of any local residents who’d like to join, where problems and issues are worked out at monthly meetings.
At Bergen House’s CAB, things were a bit rough at the beginning. “It was a community that didn’t want the shelter to be here,” Soto says. “I mean, they were really adamant.” But over time, she says, the meetings have “gotten really good.” If issues come up, they are minor. And if anything needs attention, community members know where to find her and the rest of the Core Services staff.
About a mile south of Bergen House, longtime Crown Heights resident Dion Ashman says he’s a regular at the CAB meetings for the family shelter that opened up amid fierce controversy last year at Rogers Avenue and Crown Street. At the time, Ashman, the president of the Crown Street Block Association, helped bring a lawsuit on behalf of his neighbors to stop the city from opening the family shelter down the street. (It was dismissed about a month after it was filed.)
Today, Ashman says life near the shelter isn’t so different than it was before. His neighbors occasionally complain about garbage or kids climbing on the shelter’s window sills, he said, and he recalled one time the police responded to a dispute between a couple at the building. But overall, “it isn’t as bad as we thought it would be,” he says.
“The things that people were concerned about, the quality of life issues, those haven’t really materialized,” he says. Now, the shelter advisory board meets every three months instead of monthly—because, put simply, they didn’t have enough to talk about.
“I don’t particularly like it, but I understand why they did it,” he says. “There wasn’t really enough new material to report on at the end of every month.”
But not all shelters are created equal, and one of the first new shelters opened under Turning the Tide is causing headaches for its neighbors, while also making a real difference for the chronically homeless people it aims to bring in off the street.
On the campus of the former Kingsboro Psychiatric Center in East Flatbush, a Safe Haven shelter facility opened last year for 110 men and women. The residence is different from a traditional one in several keys ways, with more relaxed rules in order to entice shelter-wary, chronically homeless people off the street. Residents do not have a daily curfew as they would at other city shelters; instead, clients sign for his or her bed every 72 hours and can leave the facility in between. They also have a bit more privacy, like dividers between beds shielding one resident from another, and plenty of of on-site resources—Clarkson Avenue has an in-house primary care clinic—and intensive case management.
Banks says the different approach at Safe Havens, including the curfew rules, are “a way to bring people in, not shut them out.”
“Part of the success of using the Safe Haven tool to bring people in off the streets is by having the flexibility to not give people the back of the hand when they come back for help,” he explains.
Though the administration’s focus on targeting help to the chronically homeless pre-dates Turning the Tide, Safe Havens have gotten a big boost under the plan. Overall, the number of beds serving street homeless New Yorkers more than doubled from about 600 beds to nearly 1,300 between 2014 and 2018. And last year alone, the city created 256 Safe Haven with plans to open another 162 this year.
All that extra effort has made a big difference for those who work with the chronically homeless. Casey Burke, program director for outreach at Breaking Ground, the city’s outreach service provider in Brooklyn and Queens, says an increase in funding and the number of beds available has been a game-changer. “For us, it’s been a huge shift,” Burke explains. “We doubled our staffing. Like, literally doubled our staffing. We’re able to reach a lot more people.”
Paradoxically, what makes the Safe Haven successful may make life harder for neighbors of the shelter. Longtime East Flatbush resident Gail Dixon lives just south of the new facility, which she vocally opposed when it was announced 18 months ago, speaking out at a public meeting in her role as president of the East 49th and East 48th Street Block Association. A year and a half later, she says her worst fears have come true.
“It’s become like a slum now,” she says. She has seen feces, liquor bottles and trash on the street. Strangers hang out on the sidewalk at all hours of the day, some drunk; her neighbors call to tell her about men urinating in gardens, sleeping on stoops, and trying locks on home and cars.
She is a member of the shelter’s advisory board and has tried repeatedly to get the shelter operator, Breaking Ground, to do more to rein in the residents. In particular, she wants the group to emphasize cleanliness and do more patrols of the area. (For its part, Breaking Ground says it conducts daily patrols by car in the neighborhood and staff emphasizes it’s hard to know if it’s their clients who are causing the issues; two other long-standing shelters operate nearby.)
Until then, however, Dixon takes matters into her own hands. “If I see anyone in front of the house and they don’t belong here, I come outside,” she says. “I just say, we have choices here. The first choice is the police department. The second choice is to call your director of your program. The third choice is to get a hose and hose your backside down.”
“They walk away,” she adds. “They might curse, or whatever, but they keep it moving.”
If all goes according to the city’s plan, between now and the end of 2021, 75 more new shelters will open in the five boroughs, and 2,500 fewer New Yorkers will be homeless.
Even the city’s harshest critics admit there are bright spots in the Turning the Tide plan. Giselle Routhier, policy director at Coalition for the Homeless, says the overall goal is worthwhile and the city has taken some positive steps, including reducing cluster sites and creating new shelters to replace crumbling facilities. “That is a legitimate day-to-day improvement,” she notes. But results are murky, and there’s a huge amount left to do.
“They’re still using hotels. They’re still near record shelter census. We haven’t gotten any meaningful reduction in the number of people who are homeless,” Routhier says. “We’re still dealing with some of the problems that continue to plague a system that’s kind of bursting at the seams more generally.”
Both critics and advocates of the plan agree Turning the Tide isn’t a solution to the true driver of homelessness: a lack of affordable housing. Mo George, of the homeless-led advocacy group Picture the Homeless, says that until the mayor makes a serious pledge to create a sufficient number of units for formerly homeless households, there will be no real progress.
While George says the mayor’s homeless plan is doing some good, his housing plan doesn’t do nearly enough for those who need the most help finding a home. At Picture the Homeless, members are not the drug-addicted stereotype portrayed in the media, she notes; they’re “working women of color with kids who can no longer afford rent in this city.”
“That is an affordability crisis. That is not a housing crisis,” George says. “If the mayor really wants to change, really wants to turn the tide, he needs to look at what programs … are out there to turn our housing into affordable housing.”
On Bergen Street, just a few doors down the first of those new shelters, Joyner-Ortiz reached the same conclusion. “There is really no low-income affordable housing left, so what’s the plan? To place people in homeless shelters?” she asks. “This is Band-Aid on the situation.”
Banks acknowledges the “problem of affordability” is the backdrop for homelessness in New York, and many other large cities. But he contends homeless prevention efforts, addressing street homelessness, and rehousing with rental assistance and social service programs “are all transforming the system” in the city. During the de Blasio administration, evictions are down 27 percent, which he attributes to a boost in funding for legal help for tenants, and the city says it has helped 95,000 people stay in their homes through new rental assistance programs.
“We’ve been throwing every tool at a problem that has been decades in the making,” he says.
Correction: This piece originally stated that there has been a 31 percent decrease in cluster sites, based on information provided by the Department of Social Services; that figure is actually 70 percent, according to the most up-to-date information from DSS. Curbed regrets the error.
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