Plan To Move Homeless Shelter Stymied
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Several community groups are rejoicing that plans to move a group of homeless men into their neighborhood have been thwarted.
The city’s Department of Homeless Services announced Monday that the State Division of Military and Naval Affairs rejected its plan to convert the Lexington Avenue Armory into an “assessment and prevention shelter for men.”
The military and naval agency, which oversees the armory, did not return repeated calls for comment.
“The community really prevailed,” the president of the Gramercy Park Block Association, Arlene Harrison, said.
Area residents were successful in making the “ill-conceived plan stop,” she said.
The homeless services agency proposed to move 120 beds into the Lexington Avenue Armory between 25th and 26th streets from the 30th Street Men’s Shelter on First Avenue. The tentative plan was to close the men’s shelter by the end of 2006.
The agency now expects to reopen the women’s facility, but the overall plan and the time frames have to be revisited, a department spokesman, James Anderson, said.
The original proposal raised fears that homeless men convicted of sexual offenses would be roaming the neighborhood around the armory. Last month, the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services’ Sex Offender Registry listed 35 Level III sexual offenders – the level considered the most likely to recidivate – as residents of the men’s shelter. In reality, Mr. Anderson said, there were only three.
Ms. Harrison said the opposition was not to the homeless. “It was always a public safety issue,” she said.
Her association and others now plan to galvanize around the “broken” system of tracking sexual offenders, Ms. Harrison said.
