Business owners, residents and city officials haggled last year over bringing a new homeless shelter to Greenpoint, one which some locals said would have brought down the neighborhood. After much heated debate, the proposal was rejected. But yesterday, Brooklyn Paper reports that Community Board 1 was presented with another proposal for a 200-bed men’s shelter to be placed on McGuinness Boulevard.
"I wish we didn’t need any shelters. I’d would love to build more housing, but the city has a legal and moral responsibility it has embraced,” said Bowery Residents’ Committee Executive Director Muzzy Rosenblatt. He argued in favor of converting a four-story industrial warehouse at Clay Street into a transitional housing center for homeless men suffering from substance abuse and mental illness. For the most part, the 150-plus residents who came to the meeting had the same questions and arguments against the shelter as they did last year. So did Greenpoint Counclman Steve Levin: "I was hoping I wouldn’t be back here this soon. My position has not changed — 400 McGuinness Blvd. is not an appropriate place for a [homeless] center.”
“Putting your facility in the middle of all that will deteriorate that community in that area. We don’t need a big shelter where you’re going to bus people here from other places,” said Christine Holowacz, a Newtown Creek Monitoring Committee member. Others pointed to existing three-quarter houses on Manahttan Avenue where drugs are traded that could attract recovering addicts seeking treatment: "You’re giving them a drug source. If you wanted to help them, put them somewhere not so close from a site where people are struggling too.”
All over the city, locals have been fighting the expansion of homeless shelters and SRO's (single room occupancy) entering their neighborhoods, including the Upper West Side. This reflects a trend that goes all the way up to Albany—the state moved to effectively shutdown Advantage, a city program intended to reduce homelessness. But The Coalition for the Homeless points out that the city has been given a court order to continue to pay Advantage rents for current Advantage tenants for the month of April, though things are not looking good for the future.
