NYC Braces For 90 New Homeless Shelters: Will Your Neighborhood Be Next?

NEW YORK, NY — Hear that? That was the sound of 90 future community battles — heated and potentially historic ones, in which New Yorkers' private, parental fears will be pitted against their greater sense of humanity — kicking into first gear.

"I'm going to say some things today that are painful to hear... and not politically convenient," NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio said at a dramatic press conference Tuesday afternoon.

The mayor then revealed an unprecedented plan to open approximately 90 brand-new homeless shelters over the next five years — as well as expand the size of 30 existing shelters over the next seven years — throughout NYC's five boroughs.

The city will waste no time breaking ground. Twenty of the new shelters will be built in 2017, de Blasio said, and another 20 in 2018.

As of last count — a count that's been rising consistently for more than three decades now — around 60,000 homeless people lived within the NYC shelter system, and 3,000 or so were still living on the street.

"The number of people in shelters has trended upward for 35 years," de Blasio said Tuesday. "That is a fact we don't look in the face enough. And that has to stop."

Below is everything we know (and don't know) about the mayor's grand plan to combat the city's homeless epidemic. We'll be updating this page with new info as we gather it, so check back for the latest. Or, if you haven't already, sign up to receive Patch's newsletters and breaking-news alerts for your NYC neighborhood.

City officials are expecting major community pushback. In fact, de Blasio's previous reluctance over his three-year tenure to move forward with a large-scale shelter rollout, even as homelessness has spiked, has reportedly had a lot to do with the exhausting amount of resistance he saw on individual shelter proposals back when he was first elected.

But de Blasio (and his close advisors) made it clear they were ready to face the pain Tuesday.

"The homeless are our neighbors," Jennifer Jones Austin, the mayor's intro speaker and the leader of a local religious nonprofit, said at Tuesday's presser. "It's in that spirit that we've come here to receive the mayor's plan."

To get out ahead of the outrage, the city has promised to notify NYC residents within 30 days of opening any new shelters.

Two to four weeks before opening day, the Department of Homeless Services will hold "at least one community meeting with local groups and leaders," officials said. "And upon request," the department will hold additional "community forums to discuss an upcoming opening."

However, it's ultimately up to the department whether to go ahead with plans for opening a new shelter — controversial as they may be.

The new engagement protocol "does not mean if there’s protest we will change our minds," de Blasio said.

Community leaders are being urged to suggest locations for new shelters. "Every neighborhood has a stake and an interest in taking on this crisis," de Blasio's plan says. And the mayor added in person Tuesday: "We're going to ask each community board to do their fair share."

The city will also form a "community advisory board" for each new shelter, so as "to ensure open dialogue around shelter issues directly after new sites open."

The first of the city's 90 new shelters already opened a couple months ago in the Bronx. Another three will open soon in the Prospect Heights/Crown Heights area of Brooklyn, according to city officials — on Rogers Avenue, Bergen Street and Prospect Place. (Read more details on those shelters here.)

Most of the 132 families slated to live at the Rogers Avenue shelter are originally from Crown Heights, the mayor said Tuesday. "They're all being brought home to their home community."

This localized strategy in Crown Heights will be applied to the rest of the city's new shelters, too: Whenever possible, the mayor said, homeless people will be housed in the same neighborhood they're from, or where they've already been living.

"We want people to be close to home," the mayor said.

City officials are hoping this approach will help soften neighbors to the idea of new shelters moving in next door — seeing as the buildings will essentially just be full of other neighbors, albeit in a time of greater need.

The neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach should also "create a more equitable distribution of homeless services across the city," officials said. Thus addressing one of the most common NIMBY complaints: that certain neighborhoods get hit with way more shelters than others. (For example, the Ocean Hill/Brownsville area of Brooklyn and a bunch of areas in the Bronx.)

The first four shelters aside, no location data has been revealed. (Not for the 90 new shelters, not for the 30 expanded shelters and not for the 12 "temporary shelters" the city plans to open "to avoid disruption in the lives of people already housed" in the latter 30 sites while they're under construction.)

We do know, however, that they'll be spread across all five boroughs, and that they'll be situated near "communities, jobs, school, houses of worship and support systems" needed to help get occupants back on track. "The shelters will be clean, well maintained and the NYPD will oversee security," officials promised.

The same cannot be said, critics have argued, for many of the approximately 360 expensive hotels and "cluster sites" the city is currently using to house its homeless.

Speaking of hotels and cluster sites: The main objective of opening all these new shelters, according to de Blasio, is to do away with the city's insane, $400,000-per-night hotel bill for homeless people and often sketchily managed, unsafe cluster sites.

(Cluster sites are essentially just regular city apartments rented out by nonprofits, who then act as middlemen/landlords between homeless people and the city. Two little girls were killed in December, mid-nap, when a radiator at their Bronx cluster site exploded. City officials have since cut ties with the nonprofit running that site.)

In all, the number of buildings within the Department of Homeless Services system would be cut roughly in half under the mayor's plan.

Existing homeless shelters will also get rehabbed. In a scathing report issued last winter, City Comptroller Scott Stringer called conditions at the city's shelters "deplorable." (Among the horrors discovered inside: Bugs. Rats. Mold. Gas leaks. Holes in the walls. Leaky roofs. Broken windows. Zero security. Etc.)

"It is imperative that not only new shelters stand-up to the City’s higher standards, but that our existing shelters do so too," de Blasio's new plan says. "The City will be allocating significant resources to improve the existing shelters."

Non-homeless people will be encouraged to use the new shelters' facilities as well. The city has promised to make "community space in shelters available not only to shelter clients but also to the surrounding neighborhood," and to "combine both shelter and permanent housing in the same projects."

Communal amenities could include meeting spaces or childcare facilities, de Blasio's plan says.

During the phaseout of hotels-as-homeless-housing, the city will be required to notify local elected officials whenever hotel rooms within their districts are being rented out by the Department of Homeless Services — so be sure to press your local politicians to share that info, if you care about that kind of thing.

The mayor's full, years-long plan is laid out in an 128-page report called "Turning the Tide on Homelessness, Neighborhood by Neighborhood." It was released Tuesday and is now available online for your perusal. (Again, if you care about that kind of thing.)

Pictured at top: The site of a soon-to-open homeless shelter site in Crown Heights. Image via Google Maps