Homeless Center Roils a Brooklyn Neighborhood

The city is planning to relocate its intake center for homeless men to a residential area of Brooklyn from Manhattan as early as next month, a move that residents say would depress the values of sought-after nearby townhouses.The Bloomberg administration is seeking to move the intake center, which processes all of the city’s single homeless men before assigning them to shelters, to the 350-bed Bedford-Atlantic Armory Shelter in Crown Heights from the Bellevue Men’s Shelter on East 30th Street and First Avenue. Bellevue, formerly a psychiatric hospital, is slated to become a hotel and conference center.Earlier this week, dozens of Crown Heights residents turned out at a hearing held by Community Board 8, vowing to fight the proposal.“Now that we can walk outside without getting shot, you’ve decided to throw sand back on our heads,” a resident, Nelcia Clarence, said to the deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Homeless Services, George Nashak. “I hope you lose your job,” she added, as attendees applauded.Mr. Nashak said the city was cutting the number of beds in the armory to 230 from 350 and that the planned facility in Crown Heights would not be the only intake center for men in the city, although he did not specify where any others would be. The plan must be approved by the state’s Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance before it is implemented.Local politicians and neighborhood residents said the plan would increase crime in the neighborhood, harm the homeless, and decrease the value of the area’s historic brownstones.“One can only expect that home values will plummet,” the owner of a brick townhouse a few blocks from the armory, Julia Zuraw, said. “I’ve been through the emotional process of knowing that I may lose everything I’ve got.”“Castle Grayskull,” as the fortress-like armory is nicknamed, is a five-floor red brick building that towers above residential streets of immaculately restored brownstones.Known for its large population of Caribbean immigrants, Crown Heights recently has become popular with wealthy homebuyers from Manhattan, Cobble Hill, and Park Slope, who are drawn to the area’s brownstones, limestone townhouses, and detached mansions.“Crown Heights has been a hidden jewel in Brooklyn,” a real estate broker at Manhattan Modern Management, Michelle Joyce-Johnson, said. “There are beautiful mansions there.”In recent years, homes in the neighborhood have sold for “prices unheard of a few years ago,” Ms. Joyce-Johnson, who currently has a $1.5 million listing for a 7,000-square-foot mansion on St. Marks Avenue, said.Despite the surrounding gentrification, the armory shelter “has the worst reputation of any shelter in the city,” a homeless man who started a Web log on computers at the Brooklyn Public Library while living at the armory, Nathan Ashford, said.“Anyone will tell you, you do not want to go there,” Mr. Ashford, who has since been transferred to another facility, said.Mr. Ashford said a suitcase with all of his belongings was stolen from under his bed at the armory and that drug use there is rampant. “I have seen people openly shoot heroin, shoot crack, smoke weed,” he said. The idea of transferring the city’s main intake center “to a facility which is so dysfunctional is totally and utterly absurd,” he said.A spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services, Heather Janik, said the move is “an opportunity to improve the Bedford-Atlantic facility.” Services and security at the center will be enhanced, she added.The Bellevue center processes about 40 people a day, or roughly 1,200 a month, according to city data, though that figure rises in cold weather.Residents said an increase in the flow of homeless men in and out of the armory will create more crime in the area and stretch the resources of the community, which they said is already overburdened.The immediate vicinity of the armory already has some 500 shelter beds and a number of halfway houses and methadone clinics, Ms. Zuraw said. The addition of the intake center will be “way too much for a residential community anywhere in the city to absorb,” she said, adding that Crown Heights already has five times more social service beds than any other community in Brooklyn. “Let’s fix this shelter for the men who are there now, not bring all the men in New York City to a shelter that’s clearly broken.”The current residents of the shelter already are somewhat disruptive to the neighborhood because they are not allowed to stay in the shelter during the day, a Crown Heights resident, Barbara Brown Allen, said. “They’re let go in the neighborhood to roam,” she said, adding that loitering and panhandling will increase significantly if the intake center comes to the area.Without daytime programs in place, the intake center is “going to be a nightmare from a real estate perspective,” a broker at Ardor NY, Jacqueline Wyatt, said. The presence of such a large facility nearby “is not a very desirable thing to have to tell a client.”The presence of a citywide intake shelter could make it harder to sell or rent homes in the area, Ms. Joyce-Johnson said. “This neighborhood is just starting to come into its own, and this could negatively impact it,” she said.Already, the large percentage of social services recipients in the area has impeded the community’s growth, said resident Sandy Taggert, who bought her red brick townhouse three years ago after selling her home in Park Slope. Despite the large number of middle-class families in the neighborhood, businesses have been reluctant to move onto the commercial strip on Nostrand Avenue, now home to fast-food restaurants and discount stores, because of perceptions of poverty in the area.“Nostrand Avenue looks like it does primarily because of the shelter,” Ms. Taggert said, adding that community groups have courted businesses like Connecticut Muffin Co. with no success. “People don’t think that we could support a really good commercial strip. We could and we’re desperate for it, but we have this constant onslaught of social services.”Ms. Taggert said the intake center could erode the community’s recent growth. “It’s not possible to create a functioning community with that many people in it that are dysfunctional,” she said. “It would just destroy the community.”

Homeless Center Roils a Brooklyn Neighborhood

Homeless Center Roils a Brooklyn Neighborhood

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