In Crown Heights, A Basement Uprising Against City's 'Shock' Homeless Shelter Plan

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — A biting cold with wind chill values in the 30s settled over Brooklyn as the sky went dark Wednesday, defying a city desperate for spring. You wouldn't have known it, though, from the scene inside Judy Stewart's small basement apartment at 186 Crown St., where she and dozens of her neighbors were holding a humid, sweaty, sardine-packed emergency meeting for hours Wednesday night — a response, they said, to the "shock" news that the city planned to open a 132-family homeless shelter on the corner, as well as another two shelters within a 1-mile radius.

"When we set up the basement, it was for about 40 people," Dion Ashman, the Crown Street block association president who led the meeting, said by phone the next day.

Ashman's final head count? Seventy-seven. And that didn't include the people who couldn't get in the front door.

"I'm a usual suspect," the block leader said. "But the meeting last night brought out the other people — the unusual suspects who normally don't come out. And that's what made it even more powerful."

For two to three hours, riled-up community members hurled questions, demands and accusations at Department of Homeless Services representative Matt Borden and a trio of reps from Samaritan Village, the nonprofit chosen by the city to run the proposed homeless shelter at 267 Rogers Ave.

Amid constant interjections from the crowd — "We can't hear you back here!"; "Oh, come on!"; "Disrespect!"; "Give me a break!"; "That is malarkey!"; "Why not Bergen Beach?" "Amen!"; and again and again, "We can't hear!" — Borden and the Samaritan Village folks claimed the shelter would be a "terrific" facility providing essential on-site services to 132 families of men, women and children who previously called Crown Heights home.

"We want to be a good neighbor," Doug Apple, the nonprofit's executive vice president, told the crowd.

Apple promised to deploy 24/7 security guards around the perimeter of the building — a recently erected hulk on the corner of Rogers and Crown that neighbors always assumed would rent or sell at market rate — and make "a significant amount of community space" available for public use. Perhaps even for meetings like this one, he said. (To which Ashman replied, coolly: "We have meetings in houses so you can see who we are.")

Despite officials' best efforts, the sense of skepticism and distrust in the room only grew throughout the night.

"It's a gross disrespect that we see [from the city]," Ashman, who had been flyering and doorbell-ringing for three days prior to get the word out, said. "Let's not even pretend that it's not."

Dwayne Nicholson, former chair of Community Board 9, spoke next.

"We need to find out what's happening here," he said. "We've got to make sure we know everything that's going on, how it's going on, how this happened, who knew, when they knew — and why more of us didn't know about it."

Many other neighbors echoed this frustration: Why were they just now hearing about this massive (and potentially messy) change to the neighborhood they've lived in for decades, they asked, within weeks of its opening date? And would their input even change anything at this point?

"How much wiggle room do we have?" Raul Rothblatt, director of community affairs for Sen. Jesse Hamilton, asked the city rep at the meeting. "It's a shock how fast this happened."

Longtime Crown Street resident Darren Farrar, 58, said the city's lack of transparency so far was a bad sign for the future of 267 Rogers. "We're talking about families this week, but will it be sex offenders next week?" Farrar asked, shaking his head.

"We just don't want you to Donald Trump us," he said.

Yvonne Reid, the 76-year-old former principal of P.S. 397 nearby, had a simple message for city rep Matt Borden: "Go back and tell them we're not for it."

The Department of Homeless Services claims it notified local elected officials and community board members about its plans for 267 Rogers Ave. — as well as the two other Crown Heights-area shelters — on Feb. 15. (We here at Patch didn't get word until March 1.) And now that the mandatory 30 days have passed since notification, city officials have said they could technically open any of the three shelters whenever they choose.

In the words of Mayor Bill de Blasio last month, upon announcing his plan to open 90 new shelters for the city's homeless population of 60,000 and rising: "When we create a new shelter facility, we will provide 30 days notice... [but] that does not mean if there’s protest we will change our minds."

In the interest of avoiding such unrest, though, the mayor vowed to only give each neighborhood its "fair share" of shelters. (And, wherever possible, to fill the shelters with natives from the nearby area.)

That's where residents living in both Community Districts 8 and 9 — together covering all of Crown Heights and Prospect Heights — are now calling BS.

They've been circulating a map in recent days, pictured below, of the distorted shelter distribution across NYC. Crown Heights is currently burdened, the Department of Homeless Services data shows, with around 30 homeless shelters and "cluster sites," sleeping nearly 1,800 people.

Why, then, residents ask, are three of the city's first five shelters planned for this already-oversaturated area?

De Blasio's ambitious shelter rollout may have also found a foe in the Brooklyn Supreme Court judiciary. On Tuesday, Judge Katherine Levine issued a final-hour restraining order against another of the three shelters, at 1173 Bergen St. in northern Crown Heights — stopping city officials in their tracks as they prepared to move 104 senior homeless men to Bergen Street from other shelters.

Judge Levine based her emergency blockade on the possibility that the city didn't properly study the upsides and downsides of putting in a shelter at this particular location, nor properly engage neighbors beforehand — sloppiness that could have immediate detrimental effects at the local level.

Around 40 residents who live near 1173 Bergen were in the courtroom when the judge's order came down Tuesday.

Also in attendance, it turns out, were Ashman and Nicholson — community leaders from a little further south, near the proposed shelter site at 267 Rogers. And they took notes.

The Rogers Avenue organizers said they're now looking into the possibility of joining the Bergen Street lawsuit.

But whichever course of action they choose, Ashman, Nicholson and the battle-ready neighbors who sweated through two to three hours of organizing in Judy Stewart's basement Wednesday night seem to have settled on a core demand: They want the city to transform 267 Rogers into permanent housing, not transient housing.

"We're not saying, by any stretch, 'Screw homeless people, forget about them,'" Ashman said. "Not at all."

"But a homeless shelter is going to be associated with more loitering; panhandling; on-the-street thefts, robberies and assaults; and more home burglaries," he said by phone Thursday. "When people feel it's truly their home, their mentality is different."

The night before, in a moment that largely set the tone for the rest of the conversation, Ashman had turned to the city staffer next to him and asked: "So, to be able to afford to live in this community, you have to be evicted, move into a shelter, then come back here through the shelter system?"

"There's something wrong here," he said.

Photos by Simone Wilson/Patch