Bensonhurst Protests Emerging as Flashpoint Against Mamdani’s Push To Build More Adult Homeless Shelters in Middle-Class Neighborhoods

Residents of Bensonhurst are putting their bodies on the line to stop construction of a homeless shelter for 150 single adult men, out of concern for the quality of life in their working-class, immigrant neighborhood. Reassurances about mental health “case management” are failing to assuage concerns among residents and local elected officials. “Show me where there’s a shelter that there’s not problems,” one longtime resident told NY1. “They’re drunk. They drink. We have kids’ schools around here. It’s not safe.”The Mamdani administration is both minimizing the residents’ concerns and telling them they must do their fair share in dealing with the city’s homeless. City Hall insists that, “as part of our equitable siting approach, we are committed to ensuring that every community has adequate safety net resources,” NY1 reports. It’s right to have an equitable siting process — but it should take the form of protecting all residential neighborhoods from having to host shelters for the population in question: single adult men. Even the leading advocacy group for such facilities — the Coalition for the Homeless — makes clear that the concerns in Bensonhurst are not baseless. “Compared to homeless families, homeless single adults have higher rates of serious mental illness, substance use disorders, and other severe health problems,” the coalition cautions. A homeless person on the street at Manhattan on December 29, 2025. Spencer Platt/Getty ImagesAmerican society has an unmet responsibility to help these troubled men. Yet we also have an obligation to protect neighborhoods from those whose schizophrenic voices may be telling them to commit violent acts, such as pushing young women on to subway tracks.To do so requires not dispersing the troubled into a neighborhood with a 16 percent poverty rate, a “second Chinatown” to which immigrants have moved in search of the American dream. Rather, we need to revisit policies which worked in the past. This back-to -the-future policy approach to the adult homeless has two core elements: rebuilding the state residential mental hospital system for those suffering from psychiatric disorders, along with basic, no-frills “single room occupancy hotels” for members of the lower working class of sound mind and body.It is not radical nor uncompassionate to suggest that the severely mentally ill should be housed in specialized facilities distant from residential neighborhoods. That was the norm in New York state and across the country not all that long ago. In 1955, New York State provided 599 psychiatric beds per 100,000 residents. Over the next 50 years, that number plummeted in 2005 to just 27 per 100,000. Today, even after Governor Kathy Hochul has added back 1,000 beds, the total is still lower — 18 per 100,000.Mayor Zohran Mamdani, right, listens as Governor Kathy Hochul speaks on March 3, 2026 at New York City. Michael M. Santiago/Getty ImagesAlthough associated with the maltreatment made infamous in the book and film “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” psychiatric hospitals — also known as asylums — offer key advantages. They can specialize in treating the severely mentally ill by concentrating the best doctors in a small number of large facilities — far more practical than promising expert “case management” across the five boroughs.A “bring back the asylum” movement has been endorsed by no less a leading liberal physician than Ezekiel Emanuel of the University of Pennsylvania, widely credited with helping to design the Affordable Care Act. As per a Journal of the American Medical Association article he co-authored, a “financially sensible and morally appropriate way forward includes a return to psychiatric asylums that are safe, modern and humane.” Yet not all currently homeless, “rough sleeper” men are mentally ill. A back-to-the-future policy for them would mean rediscovering a type of basic housing New York has essentially banned: single-room residences where occupants may have to share bathrooms and kitchens but where rents are, as a result, low. During the same era New York had a large-scale psychiatric hospital system, there were an estimated 200,000 single-room occupancy units in “hotels,” demonized as “Skid Row” on the Bowery. A combination of building and zoning code “reforms” decimated them; new ones were made formally illegal in 1954. NYU’s Furman Center has estimated fewer than 30,000 such rooms remain. Furman — a mainstream housing research group — suggests that “SROs could provide an affordable, low-cost option for individuals who are otherwise unable to afford housing. SROs once provided a housing option of last resort for people on the brink of homelessness (and illegal SROs still serve this function across the city); their legal reintroduction could provide housing to those who risk going without it.” The Lanier Hotel on the Bowery at New York City in the 1920s. Via Wikimedia CommonsYet focusing only on the needs of the homeless would not do justice to the concerns of Bensonhurst residents, whose median household income is $69,000. They are crying out for city officials to respect their needs — for safe streets and public order. It is no small task for thousands of Chinese immigrants to come to Bensonhurst and build a well-functioning neighborhood. That goal requires investment in their buildings and the future of their children. Their concerns about public order deserve to be respected, not minimized — or sacrificed on the altar of “equity.” Were Bensonhurst an independent, suburban municipality, after all, it would — like Scarsdale or Great Neck — be insulated from the pressure to do its “fair share.”Bensonhurst residents may not be able to stop the construction equipment on 86th Street. Yet they have sent a message that Mayor Zohran Mamdani cannot ignore.

Bensonhurst Protests Emerging as Flashpoint Against Mamdani’s Push To Build More Adult Homeless Shelters in Middle-Class Neighborhoods

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