Furious Brooklyn residents protest a planned homeless shelter

Thousands of protesters descended on a Brooklyn neighborhood Saturday to protest a planned homeless shelter that will house only men. The shelter, proposed by the city, will be a 32-room hotel with a community facility, and will provide services like case management, housing placement, and community partnerships that will work to provide the men with jobs. The planned site is located in heavily residential Bensonhurst, where locals have expressed unease over the site’s proximity to several schools. City officials have shot back that the neighborhood is one of few in the five boroughs without a shelter, and that residents have had ample notice, being notified back in November.

Unswayed, residents, business owners, and politicians in the mostly Asian neighborhood came together Saturday to say no to the city’s plans, as Mayor Eric Adams ‘ administration works to address the city’s rapidly rising homeless rate. ‘We’re concerned that the homeless will affect the safety of kids,’ local father Michael Huang told Fox 5 from the hectic procession of the proposed site, which will house the mentally ill. ‘It’s just going to cause more problems than we already have,’ added longtime resident Marie Brullo. ‘It’s going to increase crime .’

She, like others, forecasted unrest once the shelter comes to fruition, citing how the number of homeless in the city’s shelter system skyrocketed more than 50 percent over the past year – driven by an unrelenting surge of migrants. ‘People are going to be fighting against them,’ she said, citing how she’s lived in the neighborhood since 1966. ‘It’s going to be a war here.’ Others – including Democratic Assembly Member William Colton and City Council Member Susan Zhuang – said more of the same, promising more fighting before the facility is finished. ‘This is the wrong place and the wrong policy homeless shelters don’t help homeless people, and we are not going to be silent about it,’ said Assemblyman Colton.

‘We can do the right thing for them, affordable housing, great, use the money,’ added another protester. ‘But don’t tell us taxpayers with our money what to do with it.’ A spokesperson for the Department of Social, meanwhile, said: ‘This will be the first shelter in this community district offering New Yorkers experiencing homelessness the critical opportunity to receive quality care as they get back on their feet. ‘As part of our equitable shelter siting approach, we are ensuring that every community has the safety net resources to help their vulnerable neighbors.’ Officials reiterated: ‘[T]his community district has no shelters so we look forward to bringing this vital resource to the community.

‘Working together with our not-for-profit provider-partner Project Renewal, we will be providing robust wraparound supports as dedicated staff work closely with shelter residents to help them stabilize their lives and move into permanent housing.’ The retaliatory statement concluded: ‘As we have always done, we will continue to maintain open lines of communication with the community and remain committed to ongoing engagement as we work collaboratively to support our neighbors in need.’ Project Renewal is a New York-based nonprofit that helps homeless and low-income men and women who often have a drug addiction or mental illness – two traits officials have confirmed some of the shelter’s future inhabitants will have.

In turn, attendees Saturday toted signs urging Adams’ administration to reconsider, with one telling civic staffers: ‘We need jobs! Not Shelters!’ Others pointed to the planned site’s vicinity to multiple local schools and playgrounds, in an area known for its immigrant population and working-class demographic. ‘No shelters near playgrounds or schools’, one sign read. ‘Community’s safety first!’ insisted another. ‘No homeless shelter.’ Some addressed former NYPD Captain Adams directly, promising: ‘Kick shelters out – or we’ll vote you out.’ Meanwhile, it’s been nearly a year-and-a-half since the first-term mayor launched his controversial homeless outreach effort, as hundreds of the thousands of New Yorkers living on city streets are believed to have untreated mental illness.

In most cases, officials have classified most of these maladies as ‘severe’, with several fitting that criteria committing violent crimes in the past year. A simultaneous stream of migrants has hampered the progressive’s ongoing attempt, which has seen several facilities installed in residential neighborhoods like Manhattan’s Upper West Side in recent months. This, in turn, has spurred swift public outcry, with residents irate over several the installations proximity to where children play and congregate. Project Renewal has played a large role in these plans – as an average of 83,985 people take advantage of the city’s more than 365 shelters each day, a preliminary management report released by Adam’s office in January revealed. That’s up compared to the 54,738 individuals living in these facilities – which includes 47 repurposed hotels – that time in 2022.

Those numbers represent an uptick of at least 53 percent – a number that officials earlier this year blamed on Joe Biden and the rules his administration has placed at the border and beyond. ‘The flow of asylum seekers to New York City drove a 147 percent increase in entries to shelter for families with children and a 185 percent increase in entries to shelter for adult families,’ the report said. The report, meanwhile, added that the number of single adults entering these shelters – all run and overseen by the DHS – plummeted by 13 percent compared to a year ago. The average length of stay also dropped – by about 29 percent for families and 10 percent for singles – but Adams that same month implored the federal government to reassess its policies pertaining to migrants, as they add to the city’s already alarming homeless rate.

‘We’re getting close to anywhere from 2,500 to peaking at 4,000 a week,’ Adams told Scotto during the Tuesday interview, before which he took Fox 5’s Rosanna Scotto on a rare tour of the recently reopened asylum seeker center at Midtown’s Roosevelt Hotel. ‘What happens when there’s no more room?’ Scotto asked at one point during the interview, during which the 63-year-old Brownsville native sat opposite her, in front of several American – and one New York – flags. ‘We were not just saying we’re out of room as a soundbite,’ Adams answered, citing the more than 161,000 migrants who have arrived and sought city aid since spring 2022. ‘We’re out of room, literally’, the Democrat declared. ‘People are going to be eventually sleeping on the streets.’ The assertion spurred Scotto – apparently tired of the situation like countless other New Yorkers – to ask Adams what it would take for him ‘to close the front door.’

Adams replied that he simply could not, due to laws that prohibit both state and local officers from enforcing federal immigration laws. ‘I don’t have the authorization to tell people that they can’t come into New York City,’ Adams explained to an unaware Scotto, who went on to ask: ‘Why not?’ ‘It’s against the law,’ he replied, seemingly angry at the question. He then said it a second time, asserting once more: ‘It’s against the law.’ But Scotto persisted – asking whether he and his administration were using the city’s ‘sanctuary’ status as originally intended. She suggested he was not, to which the politician simply stated, ‘I agree.’ He, however, quickly added: ‘[But] [w]e cannot by law tell someone if they come into the city, you cannot come into the city. ‘We can’t even turn them over to ICE.’

The mayor’s assertion – while decidedly different from some of his statements early on in the crisis – was true, with The New York for All Act broadly prohibiting officials from funneling migrants into ICE custody. When asked if the local police could notify the federal agency, he cited a portion of the guidance sharing sensitive information with federal authorities. ‘The law states that we cannot notify ICE,’ the mayor reiterated. ‘I cannot break the law and enforce the law.’ When asked why officials were doling out so many benefits to migrants – such as hotel rooms, food, clothing, cellphones and even health insurance – Adams said they had now diverted to the bare essentials. ‘We have never witnessed this level of migration in this hemisphere,’ Adams said, mentioning the ‘destabilization’ of Venezuela. ‘We are being inundated, and we have now moved to another phase of saying all of those services that you’re talking about… we’re down to food, shelter, clothing. That’s it.’

He proceeded to point out that ‘[the crisis at the border] is a national problem,’ adding that ‘it’s unfair for local municipalities and cities to handle [it].’ As the dual crises continue, the city has opened more than 210 emergency shelter sites – not to be confused with its 366 homeless shelters – to address the arriving migrants. Adams announced a 60-day limit for asylum seekers this past July – a deadline that has likely contributed to the rise in unhoused New York’s taking advantage of the city’s separate homeless shelter system seen in the past year. This past week, Adams’ administration made headway in rolling back a 1981 law guarantees emergency housing for homeless people amid the migrant invasion, which accounts for approximately 183,000 new arrivals – a number ‘larger than the population of most US cities,’ Adams said Friday as he reached an agreement that limits how many single adult migrants can reapply for a shelter bed after 30 days.

‘Over the last two years, our city has been managing an ongoing national humanitarian crisis, providing shelter and care to approximately 183,000 new arrivals,’ Adams said. ‘Today, the City of New York came to an agreement with The Legal Aid Society which gives us additional flexibility under the 1981 consent decree known as “Callahan” that addresses the “Right to Shelter.”’ He added in a video recording shared to X of the ‘right to shelter’ law: ‘We have been clear since day one that the right to shelter was never intended to apply to large-scale migrant populations arriving without housing or legal work status.’ That said, the change did not change the current 60-day shelter limit that is in place for migrant families, nor did it pertain to homeless New Yorkers – the demographic that will inhabit the Bensonhurst facility.

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