Several police officers gather on the corner of Clay Street and Manhattan Avenue, near the family homeless shelter. Were they gathering for any particular reason, we asked? “No we are just patrolling.” So it’s not because of the shelters? “Among others things.” Like what? “General patrolling. Keeping it safe.” Kajsa Lundman/ The Ink
On the one hand, residents talk about a quality-of -life issue. On the other, crime is down and property values are up.
Two homeless shelters recently opened in the northern part of Greenpoint, the first in 2012 and the second in 2014, despite opposition. Officials argued that the Community District has been unfairly overburdened. People living in the area feared that their property values would go down and that their “quality of life” would be damaged. Greenpoint concluded that homeless shelters equaled problems.
Have their fears come true? In some ways, no, it seems. And in other ways, yes, although it can be difficult to separate what people fear from what really happens.
The biggest complaint: People in the area say that residents of the shelters urinate on the streets and litter the parks. A police officer who wouldn’t give his name said that a lot of minor crimes are associated with the family shelter on 66 Clay Street. What type of crimes? “Public urination and public drinking,” the officer said.
Yet according to public records, the crime statistics have gone down in Greenpoint since the homeless shelters opened. Looking back five to ten years, crime statistics have gone up. But they have declined by 4.07 percent over the past two years—the period since the shelters opened. Residents’ fears of being physically hurt don’t seem to have materialized.
At a town hall meeting back in September, people were upset and worried about the shelters. A woman claimed that when the men’s shelter opened, she had to witness full frontal nudity and public urination. Another woman said that men were hanging out in the park where her daughter plays. “How am I supposed to know if the sex offenders are the ones sitting in front of my daughter?’ she asked. The men’s shelter, run by Bowery Resident’s Committee (BRC), promised to look into the matter and to share any information about convicted sex offenders with the police.
The men’s shelter is an “assessment” shelter, and thus gets all kinds of men who are homeless for all sorts of reasons, and who may have nothing in common with each other except that they lack a home. Some sex offenders and criminals do stay for a time at the shelter, according to nydailynews.com and the Bowery Resident’s Committee, along with non-criminals and people with mental health problems. The shelter evaluates what type of help the men need, and within five weeks the men are either provided housing or sent further into the shelter system, according to Kevin Martin, deputy executive director of homeless services for BRC.
The men’s shelter opened in August 2012. Some locals and business owners created a corporation in order to battle the 200-bed shelter, which they wrote “threatens to ruin our current lifestyle and the safety and quality of the neighborhood,” according to DNAinfor.com The group failed to stop the shelter from opening, however.
Instead, another shelter opened, the family shelter on Clay Street.
No one seemed to know that the family shelter would open—not even the Community Board, not until Assemblyman Joseph Lentol received a letter from Department of Homeless Services. The letter, dated November 5, 2014, said that a 91-bed family shelter would open on Clay Street, run by Home Life Services. Lentol immediately wrote back to Commissioner Gilbert Taylor, New York City Department of Homeless Services: “Yet another city administration has unfairly chosen my district, which has been saturated with shelters to house the homeless,” he wrote. “Other communities are not carrying this same burden.” He referred to the city’s Fair Share Criteria, which says that the city should distribute facility “burdens” and “benefits” fairly, according to New York Department for City Planning.
But Lentol wasn’t precisely right when he wrote that other communities do not carrying the same burden as Community District 1. CD1 now has four shelters. That is slightly more than the Brooklyn median of three shelters, but slightly less than the Brooklyn average of 4.2 shelters. New York City’s average is 3.9 shelters. And a few community districts in the Bronx have over a dozen shelters.
Before Lentol’s letter reached Department of Homeless Services, the family shelter on 58-66 Clay Street had already opened. It is conducted as an emergency shelter for couples—either a husband and wife, or two siblings, or a parent and (adult) child. From 9 in the morning to 10 in the evening, the corner on Manhattan Avenue and Clay Street is crowded with people from the family shelter. “They aren’t doing anything illegal, but we are not feeling safe. What can we do? Who can we call when people are congregating in the corner? It is our freedom to feel safe,” said a man at the town hall meeting.
Near the family shelter on a recent visit, Ms. Castillo—who has stayed at the family shelter for nine months—stopped to talk. She was asked about local residents’ complaints. “I think it is just because we are loud, and stuff like that,” Castillo said. At the corner people often call to each other from across the street or laugh cheerfully. But Castillo concedes that sometimes the people there are loud due to other reasons: “Everyone has arguments, husbands and wives. People talk in loud voices,” she said. “And then they come with the police. It is crazy, just for having an argument with your husband!”
Tonia Reid rounded the corner. She stays at the family shelter with her husband. She said that some of the residents in the shelters have warrant violations. Some got their warrants before they arrived at the shelter; others got them while staying at 66 Clay. What do they do to get warrants? “They drink beer outside, since they can’t drink at the shelter,” she said.
In fact, residents can’t bring in any bottles or cans into the shelter. The facility has a scanner that residents must pass before entering, which searches them for metal items such as knives. There are security guards at the shelter, and guards have been patrolling the block since September.
Castillo said that the guards treat shelter residents as if they were three years old. “They ask you like ‘where are you going,’” she said. Reid said that she feel that the guards think that that “they are better than us, just because they work here.” Or, “Perhaps because they have a home,” she added.
Both Reid and Castillo said that they like to talk to strangers on the street. They say “hi” to people, the women said, and some people say hi back, although others just give them “the look.” Reid said that there is a very nice woman down the block who always greets her. And a man came by one day and gave her crab and fish.
On another street not far from the family shelter is Maya Hernandez, with her two sons. She lives nearby both of the homeless shelters. Even though her sister’s car has been broken into three times since the men’s shelter on McGuiness Boulevard opened, she said she appreciates the diversity that the shelters bring to the neighborhood, where she grew up (Hernandez believed that the homeless shelter on 66 Clay Street had always been there. Maybe that is not so strange, since the building used to be a three quarter housing with a drug clinic).
Tony, who didn’t want to give his last name, said that the residents from the family shelter are stealing and urinating in public, but he concedes that he hadn’t seen any of this himself. He knows through friends, he said. He also pointed to the residential building across the shelter and said that he feel sorry for the owners. Maybe they bought those apartment without knowing what was coming, he said.
But in contrast to what people feared about property values—that they would plummet after the shelters arrived—most of the houses around the shelters have increased in market value since the opening of the men’s shelter in 2012. On Clay Street, the common street of the two shelters, market values have gone up for 31 out of 50 buildings, according to NY City Map and NY Department of Finance. And the market values overall in Greenpoint have gone up.
Greenpoint is hardly alone in resisting homeless shelters from entering a community. Last summer there was a rally against a homeless shelter in Elmhurst, Queens. Residents argued that the homeless should pay rent and get jobs. In the South Bronx, too, people were outraged about a homeless shelter moving in to 470 East 161st Street, according to DNAinfor.com.
The resistance comes in a time when New York City’s homeless population has reached its highest level since the 1930, during the Great Depression, according to Coalition for the Homeless.
