Residents Question Motives Behind Beekman Street Shelter Plan
Community Board 1 (CB1) has enacted a resolution calling upon the administration of Mayor Eric Adams to pause a plan for a new homeless shelter for 170 homeless men on Beekman Street until more information about the plan is disclosed to the community.
At its January 23 monthly meeting, CB1 voted by a margin of 23 to five to demand “a public meeting/informational session, as required, to be held within the next 60 days to review the project and plans as well as any opportunities to change the population it serves from single men to families.”
This resolution was enacted after more than a dozen speakers rose to voice reservations about the City’s plan for a shelter at 41-43 Beekman (near the corner of William Street), which is located steps away from the Spruce Street School, a facility that hosts more than 400 kindergarten-through-eighth grade students.
At the January 17 meeting of CB1’s Quality of Life Committee (also attended by dozens of concerned residents), representatives from Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Social Services revealed that the City had not yet signed a lease for the Beekman Street building, which now being emptied of tenants and where construction for conversion to a shelter is slated to begin later this year. For this reason, the terms of the lease are not yet public. These officials promised that they would convene the kind of informational session demanded in CB1’s subsequent resolution, but rebuffed calls for this meeting to take place before the lease was signed, and indicated that it might not be held until after the shelter has opened (a milestone now scheduled for 2025).
At the same meeting, CB1 chair Tammy Meltzer disclosed that the 2021/2022 annual report from the developer who will operate the shelter on the City’s behalf stated that it expected to open a facility at that location, meaning that such plans have been in development for several years. She raised questions about why the City had not notified CB1 until October 2023. These queries went unanswered.
At the January 23 CB1 meeting, Scott Hobart, a parent at the Spruce Street School, said, “this is a facility that is being placed right in the middle of 500 school children, who are some of the most vulnerable residents of the City. And they have not been taken into account whatsoever.”
“When I first heard of the shelter,” he continued, “I came together with other concerned parents, and we drafted a petition. We now have 1,400 signatures in support of that petition.” The online petition started by Spruce Street School parents requests a family shelter rather than an adult single men’s shelter.
He added that the answers provided by DHS representatives at the earlier Quality of Life Committee meeting “were frankly pathetic and in no way satisfactory. We’ve gone from recognizing that there’s a need to to seek more information, to go beyond that and to actually mount opposition. We are engaging legal support, a range of consultants, and a ten-year veteran of DHS to give us guidance. This is just the beginning of what we see as a very long battle and one that really is worth all of us coming together to join and support.”
Another Spruce Street parent, Carlo Colabro, said, “we were told several times by DSS that it was complicated to understand why the shelter needed to be a single men’s shelter. This is fundamentally untrue. It’s not complicated; it’s tragically simple. We’re pitting an incredibly wealthy real estate investor against the vulnerable. And the vulnerable are both the children and the homeless.”
“If you divide the square footage of that building by the 170 people they want to cram in there,” he continued, “you get conditions that would be borderline illegal for prisons. There is absolutely nothing in this shelter that is about helping the weak. It is about making a wealthy real estate investor even wealthier. And the ones that will pay the check for that are the vulnerable: the homeless and the children. There is no one except the landlord that will get a good service out of this deal and that is exactly why we should pause it and think.”
Mr. Colabro’s point bears analysis. The building at 41-43 Beekman Street contains 13,840 square feet of interior space, according to Besen Partners, which represented the building when it was for sale in 2020. This means that each of the 170 single men sheltered there have access to no more than 81 square feet. But this per-person footprint will be actually much smaller, owing to the space needed for bathing facilities; office, security, and administrative spaces; and a kitchen and dining area.
If these uses take up just 20 percent of the building (slightly more than 500 square feet on each of the building’s five stories, or an area no larger than 20 feet by 25 feet), the remaining available space shrinks to 11,072 feet, which means that each man sheltered there would have 65 square feet.
According to the City’s Department of Corrections website, this exceeds by just eight percent the legally required minimum space 60 square feet per prisoner in dormitory-style detention facilities.