NYC to close homeless shelter....prime real estate, you know. [View All]

A few of the men staying in the shelter said that they had come straight from living on the streets. One said he had been displaced in a fire, another said he had lost his job and apartment because of a medical condition, and a third said he had a minimum-wage job delivering free newspapers, but did not earn enough to afford a single-room occupancy hotel. As he spoke, rats from a nearby construction site scurried along the curb.

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THE old brick building that sits behind a tall iron fence at East 30th Street and First Avenue has been a haven for the lost since 1931. From that year until 1984 it operated as Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital, and now its ivy-covered walls house some 600 homeless men, along with the main intake center for homeless men citywide. Soon, the building will provide more luxurious shelter: In March, the city’s Economic Development Corporation announced plans to convert it into a hotel and conference center.

The building, the agency says, will be vacant and ready for development by June 2009. The Department of Homeless Services plans to shift its homeless occupants into similar shelters. But it is the fate of the intake center, where homeless people entering the system go to be processed, evaluated and assigned to longer-term housing, that is stirring opposition. The city’s plan, to move the operation to the shelter at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has raised objections on both sides of the East River.

In Brooklyn, opponents object to the idea of moving more homeless people through their area. In Manhattan, opponents contend that removing the intake center from the borough with the most street homelessness — a city study earlier this year showed that Manhattan had 58 percent of the city’s street homeless people, compared with Brooklyn’s 16 percent — will discourage people from using shelters...


Some of the men had not heard about the city’s plans, and those who had reacted with cynicism. Ray Ramos, 58, predicted that more people would end up on the street or in crowded rooming houses, adding, “Politicians know this will happen. They don’t give a damn,” he said. “They’ll put you in a bird cage. All they want is the premises.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/nyregion/thecity/18disp.html?ref=thecity