The city’s plan to shuffle homeless residents around to different shelters to appease aggrieved Upper West Siders could mean that families living in a Brooklyn shelter get abruptly sent to different facilities all over the city, uprooting their kids just before the school year starts.
In a plan that Councilmember Stephen Levin likened to “falling dominoes,” Levin's staff learned Friday about an updated plan by the city Department of Homeless Services with the goal of moving homeless residents out of the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side. Some Upper West Side residents have complained for months about the presence of homeless men in the neighborhood since the hotel began housing them, and threatened to sue the city.
The 300 men who were at the Lucerne will move to the Harmonia Hotel in Midtown. To make space for them, some of the Harmonia’s residents are to go to the Long Island City Plaza Hotel in Queens.
But as the Daily News reported Saturday, the LIC Plaza Hotel is already occupied by women in a homeless shelter there -- so those women are being moved to the Flatlands Family Residence in Brooklyn, which is currently occupied by families including kids.
And those families are being moved to other family facilities -- Levin, who chairs the City Council’s Committee on General Welfare, told Gothamist on Saturday that the city tries “to make sure that the families [are] moving in the borough where their youngest child is in school -- which is not particularly helpful,” he said.
Calls and emails to DHS and City Hall were not immediately answered on Saturday.
Legal Aid Society of New York, which threatened to file a lawsuit against the city to block moving residents out of the Harmonia, said the plan was “reckless and callous.”
“The City somehow believes that it is a safe and responsible decision to uproot families with young children at Flatlands Family Residence just days before school begins," said Judith Goldiner, Attorney-in-Charge of the Civil Law Reform Unit at Legal Aid, in a statement Saturday. "Families across New York City are already on edge about the start of school in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, and with this plan, the de Blasio Administration is cruelly and needlessly heightening that anxiety for these already vulnerable families at Flatlands."
If the city moves forward with the plan, nearly 900 New Yorkers in city shelters will be moved around to accommodate the change sparked by de Blasio’s decision to move the Lucerne residents, following a well-funded legal campaign against the shelter and wide-spread anti-homeless rhetoric on a neighborhood Facebook page.
“It's just a huge logistical mess for no reason. There's no reason to close the Lucerne,” Levin said. “The only reason to close the Lucerne is to either to avoid a lawsuit or to appease…just some people on the Upper West Side, who made a big deal about this.”
Outside the Lucerne Hotel on September 9, 2020
The COVID-19 pandemic made the city’s traditional congregate shelters unsafe for habitation, prompting the city to move 10,000 residents to hotels to prevent the spread of the coronavirus.
Levin said there are vacancies in the homeless shelter system right now, since homelessness rates have actually dropped partly because of the eviction moratorium. “There's some vacancies throughout the system. But it's spread out throughout the system. It's not like one shelter’s sitting vacant,” he said.
More than 60 hotels in the city are currently being used as shelters, and Levin said he’d welcome homeless residents in his downtown Brooklyn district’s hotels as well. Moving people back to traditional shelters right now is "a terrible idea because we could have another spike -- we're going into the fall. This is not the time that we would want to move everybody back into a higher risk setting,” he said.
By Friday afternoon, the city seemed to have stopped moving people out of the Harmonia, and the shelter operator told Gothamist/WNYC that the final move-out date is unclear and will be postponed until DHS can make proper accommodations for people with disabilities.
Levin said as of Saturday he was unclear on the status of the Lucerne and Harmonia moves.
The city’s convoluted planning came as a surprise to residents at some of the affected shelters. “It doesn’t make sense to uproot families from a family shelter to turn around and make it for singles,” a woman who lives at Flatland Family Residence told The Daily News. “The school year is about to start. Why would they do something like that? That doesn’t make sense.”
Giselle Routhier, policy director for the Coalition For the Homeless, said this plan to move residents from shelter to shelter will “only add extra stress.”
“Homelessness in itself is a traumatic experience for children and families. To face an abrupt move from a shelter placement, especially at the beginning of a very chaotic and uncertain school year will only add extra stress for children and parents,” said Routhier in an email statement. “The domino displacement and related stress of families and single adults to appease one NIMBY group on the Upper West Side is totally unnecessary and the decision should be reversed immediately.”
Goldiner of Legal Aid said homeless residents are being treated like game pieces.
“It was predictable from the start and it is now very clear that the Mayor’s ill-advised reaction to the Upper West Side NIMBYism is causing fallout for hundreds of New Yorkers across the shelter system,” her statement said. “His mismanagement of this self-created crisis is both reckless and callous, treating homeless New Yorkers as board game pieces who can be casually moved about. We will immediately engage the City on behalf of Flatlands’ residents to ensure that their needs are being met; otherwise we’ll vindicate their rights in court."
