City Provides First Details on Homelessness in Sunset Park

SUNSET PARK, BROOKLYN — The city is renting about 210 rooms for homeless families in Sunset Park hotels, officials said at a Community Board 7 meeting Thursday. The rooms average two or three people each, meaning that between 400 and 600 homeless people are living in area hotels.

Additionally, there are 150 single men living in a former hotel, now permanent shelter, on 49th Street between 2nd and 3rd Avenue, the officials confirmed. That shelter is operated by Samaritan Daytop Village.

The numbers were offered during the first meeting of CB 7's new Ad Hoc Committee on Homelessness, which is being chaired by Windsor Terrace resident Arun Abraham Singh. CB 7 represents Sunset Park and Windsor Terrace.

The issue of community homelessness, specifically homelessness in Sunset Park, gained increasing prominence last year, as the city started renting a growing number of area hotel rooms for homeless families — largely without notice, according to many residents.

At the CB 7 meeting, Daniel Tietz, a staffer with the city's Human Resources Administration, took time to link the "challenge with regard to homelessness" the city is facing to a lack of affordable housing.

A recent report by Comptroller Scott Stringer put the number of homeless New Yorkers at 60,500, up from 37,500 in 2011.

Tietz stressed that "thousands" of those individuals are currently living in "cluster sites," or apartments the city is renting from landlords. The Bill de Blasio administration is hoping to return many such units to the city's subsidized housing pool, Tietz said, allowing their current occupants to stay, and immediately cutting the official homeless number by a significant amount.

In the meantime, de Blasio is working to increase affordable housing throughout the city, he said. Legal assistance for families facing evictions has been increased, he continued, and rental assistance is up. Without such measures, Tietz claimed that the city's homeless population could be 10,000 people higher.

Faced with many emergency situations, however, and dealing with a lack of available shelters and subsidized housing, the city is forced to rent hotel rooms for those who need, and have a legal right, to housing, Tietz said — a current total of about 3,500 or 3,600 rooms nightly. (Stringer's audit found the city spending about $400,000 per night on such rentals.)

Some of the community members who attended the meeting criticized the city for failing to provide more affordable housing. Many, however, focused their frustration on what they said was a lack of transparency from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and the Human Resources Administration (HRA) concerning the actions the agencies are taking in the community.

CB 7 district manager Jeremy Laufer, for example, said the board received just one week's notice before the 49th Street shelter officially opened its doors in 2015.

Tietz said the agencies' new policy is to provide communities with at least 30 days notice before a new shelter opens, though he did not say if any public notice was required before the city could start renting hotel rooms for homeless individuals.

In a Friday afternoon statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency is "in the process of developing a [notification] policy with regard to use of commercial hotels."

Tietz said that more public meetings were coming on the topic, which the board welcomed eagerly.

"When things are done secretly, you're stigmatizing your own clients," Laufer said to the officials.

The staffers said that they didn't intend to increase the number of homeless individuals staying in Sunset Park, and denied suggestions that a disproportionate number of homeless people were living there. For example, Tietz said almost all of the city's cluster sites are in the Bronx, northern Manhattan, and central Brooklyn, and have been there for decades.

The tenor of the conversation often expressed a general local unease with homeless individuals in the community, though those Patch spoke to didn't have a unified opinion on either that point, or on what exactly they wanted the city to do going forward.

Board member Zachary Jasie said a fight between homeless people staying at the Wyndham Sunset Park on 39th Street which took place while his family was there was troubling. But he also said that locals "are concerned with the welfare of people who live next door," including homeless people, and that he didn't support "kicking anyone out on the street."

Yet, housing homeless people in hotels is inherently problematic, he said, an opinion shared by CB 7 chair Daniel Murphy. Often, a lack of services is provided, the board members said, while hotel managers don't have any obligation to look out for the interests of their homeless tenants.

"We're not redlining the district to keep people out," Murphy said, referring to homeless individuals. But he stressed that more services should be provided and more official shelters should be used by the city.

Gloria Novoa, a local property owner, said she has a long history of hosting homeless families in her buildings, and has rarely had any problem. But she, too, called for better services to be provided to such families.

"You have to take the humanitarian position," Novoa said. "If they're going to put in the people, put in the services."

At the same time, Novoa said she no longer feels comfortable letting children play in Pena Herrera Park at the corner of 3rd Avenue and 47th Street, due to the presence there of homeless men with apparent mental illnesses.

DHS staffer Doreen Thomann-Howe stressed that services and caseworkers are provided to homeless individuals regardless of where they are staying, adding that additional services could be provided if the city had more shelter space. But she also noted that "people have the right to self-determination," meaning the city can't force someone to seek job or health assistance.

Delvis Valdez, who sits on the board of the Sunset Park Business Improvement District, said area shopkeepers have complained about homeless people on 5th Avenue.

"They're scaring individuals," he said. "We feel they're not getting the services they need to get." Valdez also said he thinks homeless services in Sunset Park should be reserved for locals who become homeless, rather than those brought in from other neighborhoods.

Another meeting attendee, who asked to remain anonymous, perhaps best embodied some of the overlapping feelings displayed during the meeting. She had spent years working to manage affordable housing in Brooklyn, she said, and her own brother had been homeless for a time.

Even so, she said she's asked for money by panhandlers every day, adding that it makes her uncomfortable.

"It's almost like I'm afraid to say no," she said.

Not everyone who is homeless causes problems in the area, she stressed, but enough do for the issue to be one worth worrying about.

Pictured at top: from left, Doreen Thomann-Howe, Matt Borden from DHS, Arun Abraham Singh and Daniel Tietz. Photo by John V. Santore