For several weeks, there was a banner that hung outside the new, six-story red brick building at 65 Clermont Avenue, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. The banner trumpeted the arrival of luxury condominiums to passing drivers along the nearby Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. So Peter Mark, who lives several doors up the street, was surprised to hear it was actually going to be a homeless shelter.
Mark: The way that we found out about it was a woman down the street saw mattresses being carried in. That seemed an odd thing to carry into brand new luxury condo 12-unit building. And so she asked, and apparently, whoever the workman was knew more about what was going on there than anyone who lived near the building. And he said it was going to be a shelter.
Mark and his neighbors felt betrayed by the developers, and by the city, which had yet to tell them, or their elected representatives, that a hotel for the homeless was coming to the block.
Mark: We had protests and we were out in front of the building, during the month and a half before it opened. A lot of the kids in the neighborhood were out there yelling, “Houses, not Hotels.”
The Clermont Family Residence now houses twenty-four homeless families, placed there by the city at a cost of ninety-seven dollars a night. That’s nearly three thousand dollars a month – roughly three times the market rate for a studio apartment in Fort Greene.
About a mile away, in Prospect Heights, Patti Hagan stands before what used to be a mattress factory at 768 Pacific Street.
Hagan: We saw work going on here starting last spring, And, both this building and 603 Dean, when they asked, said, oh it’s going to be a school, it was gonna be artists’ lofts.
Instead, it became a shelter for ninety homeless families last summer, over the last-minute objections of stunned local officials. The desire to find out how this happened has sparked a year-long quest for Hagan, a former fact checker for the New Yorker.
Hagan: I have the architect’s plans, where it started off as artists’ lofts. You can see, they were double the size – and more than that – of these rooms…
She reaches into one of her bags of documents and notebooks, and pulls out a map of social service providers in her neighborhood.
Hagan: I mean, this was just such a sneaky maneuver. We have got, with these, it comes to about 48 social service facilities, most of them group residences. But of a much smaller size, and they have come openly and honestly into the community. And answered questions. You know, come in, in the light of day.
In the 80s and 90s, the city moved the homeless out of its own inadequate and dangerous shelters, and into privately-owned facilities. The public has far less say over what’s done on private land than on public land. It’s as if someone built a Holiday Inn, and decided to rent the rooms exclusively to city agencies to house the homeless. There’s no public input required for such an arrangement. Fort Greene resident Peter Mark.
Mark: That is the loophole that this system is based on. The fact that these properties are privately owned. If it’s government owned, you have to go thru all this – you know – the process. And obviously a lot of people like to cut corners on those things to get things done.
The city’s Department of Homeless Services uses sixty-one homeless hotels; more than half of them have opened since 2000. WNYC has learned that the city is paying more than 180 million dollars this fiscal year alone to house the homeless in these hotels, and in temporary apartments. Democratic City Councilman James Davis represents Fort Greene.
Davis: The community has the right to be a part of the process. You just don’t come in with a city-financed business into a block where people are city taxpayers and ignore their concerns. It just doesn’t work that way. Everyone has a right – especially when there’s city dollars involved – to be a part of the process.
Even though these hotels are privately owned, they could still be subject to a public process, if they had a contract with the city worth more than one hundred thousand dollars.
WNYC found that the city’s Department of Homeless Services paid more than one hundred thousand dollars this fiscal year to all but four of its 61 homeless hotels.
However, these hotels operate without any contracts. They do tens of millions of dollars of business with the city based on handshake deals.
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Sister Barbara Lenninger with
one of the children at the Thorpe Family Residence. Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein
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That doesn’t seem quite right to Sister Barbara Lenninger. She’s a Roman Catholic Dominican nun and runs the Thorpe Family Residence in the Bronx. On a recent afternoon, three children played tag in the recreation room. Lenninger’s program provides child care, and other social services, on-site. And Lenninger has a contract with the city.
Lenninger: There’s an incredible amount of paperwork we have to provide for what’s going on in our program, many meetings we have to go to, and we really work hard.
So Lenninger was surprised when she found out a few months ago that an apartment building a few blocks away was becoming a homeless hotel.
Lenninger: I was astounded. I was astounded as a member of the community board, and I was called by the head of the community board to verify my knowledge of the program. I knew nothing about it…
That’s because the homeless hotel, the Lex Bronx Residence, is privately owned, and it doesn’t have a contract. Lenninger is upset that it wasn’t scrutinized the way her organization was.
Lenninger: On the one hand, I can understand the great need for providing some kind of housing for homeless people. But I don’t think it’s fair to just jump over the process and announce that this is opening.
The operator of the Lex Bronx, David Somerstein, did not respond to numerous requests for comment.
Gibbs, at a hearing, to one of the council members: So, I would like to start with an apology to you personally, because in the one instance when we did fail to give notice –
At a city council hearing last September, Linda Gibbs, the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services, apologized several times to angry council members about hotels that opened in their neighborhoods. Gibbs explained that communities are told, at least seventy-two hours in advance. But council members wanted to be consulted, not just notified with a phone call or letter….which Democratic Councilmember John Sanders complained he didn’t even get when a 350-room Best Western near Kennedy Airport turned into a homeless hotel.
Sanders: I received not one sentence from any office, we had to actively get out there and get this. The only information I received was from very disgruntled constituents, and I had to play catch-up.
Gibbs: I only want to repeat that I will continue to work on this issue. I don’t think it’s an easy issue. I think it’s a difficult issue for any community, even if it ultimately is a shelter that is flawless in opening and presents no community problems. The fears and the misperceptions are very difficult to deal with, and I will continue to do my job of communicating when we have new shelters that will be present in your community.
As for contracts, city homeless officials, past and present, say that providing an ever-growing number of homeless people with shelter in twenty-four hours, as required by the courts, means opening facilities faster than contracts will allow.
Bailey: Making contracts for anything in the city of New York is a convoluted process. It takes a lot of time.
Bob Bailey provides legal counsel to the Human Resources Administration, which provides housing for homeless people with AIDS. Speaking with WNYC’s Andrea Bernstein, he articulated a long-held city position.
Bailey: The demand for emergency housing is something that fluctuates unpredictably from month to month. We need to get housing quickly. We also need the flexibility to decommission somebody who’s not providing medically appropriate housing quickly, without him being able to sue us, because he doesn’t think we had cause to decommission him.
Andrea Bernstein: There are lots of needs that fluctuate in the city, and the city has ways of dealing with it. Salt to clean up snowstorms. I mean, you don’t know whether it’s going to snow one inch, or three feet in any winter. The city has a lot of things it procures that it doesn’t know what the need is going to be, and those are contracted. So there is a model for doing it.
Bailey: I don’t have anything to add.
HRA officials now say they’re taking the issue of contracting homeless hotels “under advisement.” As for DHS, in the past year, the agency has contracted with more facilities, but that effort is barely keeping pace with the increase in non-contracted hotels. Gibbs says she’s going to start moving those “handshake hotels” into contracts. When pressed, she couldn’t provide details.
In interviews with current and former city officials, it’s clear that part of the resistance to contracts is an underlying fear of community input. Muzzy Rosenblatt, acting commissioner of homeless services during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s second term, says “doing the good government thing” sometimes comes at a political price.
Rosenblatt: We would actually have to close some facilities. Good facilities that were running fine, that we said, okay, we’re going to put ‘em on contract, and then the community said, all right, now we have a voice in the process and we want it closed. And we were closing facilities that were good facilities. And that was the tragedy of it.
But the city itself may have been partly responsible for sowing the seeds of prejudice and fear. Joan Malin worked for more than twelve years on homeless issues, and was the commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services from 1994 to 1996.
Malin: I do know painfully the experiences of, in the 80s, opening up facilities and literally opening up drill floors in armories, where we would put 500 to 1,000 men that night because we had no place else to send them and the furor that would create in the communities. And I think we still live in the aftermath of that, where they’re feeling disillusioned and abused and a lack of trust in government.
Malin notes that the city doesn’t place hundreds of homeless people overnight in an armory anymore. And she believes that smaller facilities, with supportive services, do not have a negative affect on neighborhoods.
Malin: And God knows, I’ve been through enough siting battles where I would get screamed at and then I would come back and be invited back for Thanksgiving dinner and there would be the local block association helping the families, and it’s a very positive experience. So it doesn’t have to be negative.
New Yorkers, though, may be less inclined to embrace their local shelter when it seems to be foisted upon them, almost overnight. For WNYC, I’m Amy Eddings
Interviews:
Jacqueline Davis: “How long have you lived
in these hotels? Ever since I was 18 off and on I never had an apartment
yet. How are you now? 35.”
Listen
Sadie James: “My youngest is fifteen and I gave temporary
custody of him to my older son until I find a place because he’s
in school and I do not want him traveling around with me every 28 days.”
Listen
Lester and Annette Bell: “We lived in Baltimore, Baltimore,
MD, unlike New York doesn’t do anything for married couples. We lost
our apartment, we lost our job with World Com….We knew how the system
worked and said let’s come to New York to start all over again.”
Listen
Patricia Smith, First Deputy Commissioner, New York City Human
Resources Administration and Bob Bailey, Counsel, HRA. “If it’s
a medically appropriate environment, we will put people there.”
Listen
Linda Gibbs, Commissioner, New York City Department of Homeless
Services, “This is a legal relationship that we have for use of conditional
placements. There is nothing inappropriate about it. What we’re looking
at is trying to build a stronger relationship with the providers that
does use the procurement process.”
Listen
'Handshake hotels' are only part of the city's uncontracted, emergency homeless housing program. Temporary apartments are also used. Read Bernstein and Eddings' report HERE
NonProfit Homeless Housing Provider May Have Misused
Public Funds Part
1 and Part
2
NYC
Homeless Services
NYC
Human Resources Administration
NYC Housing Preservation and Development
| Handshake Hotels home | part 1 | part 2 | part 3 |