For the second time in less than a week, New York City on Monday canceled plans for a shelter in Chinatown, where community protests have been held. Complicated Mayor Eric Adams’ Efforts To get homeless New Yorkers off the streets.
A closed hotel at the busy intersection of Grand Street and Bowery would have had a 94-bed shelter. The site is near where an Asian American woman was killed in an attack in February, for which a homeless man has been charged. The shelter’s operator, Housing Works, had planned to allow illegal drugs in the building, a move that drew fierce condemnation from local residents.
Both canceled shelters are of a special type known as safe havens or stabilization hotels, which offer more privacy and social services and fewer restrictions than traditional shelters. Mr. Adams announced plans last week Open at least 900 rooms In such shelters by the middle of 2023.
The city department of homeless services, which previously said the large street-homeless population in the neighborhood made it an important place to add shelter capacity, said Monday it would open a facility for the homeless in an area with reduced services. ,
“Our goal has always been to work with communities to understand their needs and to distribute shelter equitably across all five boroughs to serve our most vulnerable New Yorkers,” the department said in a statement. That’s what the city offered when it announced it last week It won’t open other Chinatown sheltersat 47 Madison Street.
But uncertainty about which union workers will work at the shelter may also have played a role in the shelter’s cancellation. Housing Works CEO Charles King said the organization needed to use workers from the retail, wholesale and department store union, which represents Housing Works employees.
But the powerful New York Hotels and Gaming Trades Council, which has close ties with Meyer and is known as the Hotel Trades Council, said it has an existing contract with the owner of the building, a former Best Western hotel, Which requires a building for its employees to use. “There’s only one contract with this building, and it’s ours,” said Hotel Trades Council president Rich Marocco.
Mr. King said Housing Works has proposed an agreement under which the owner will hire eight Hotel Trades Council employees. But he said the city commissioner of social services, Gary Jenkins, who oversees the department of homeless services, told him the city was pulling the plug on the shelter at the urging of the Hotel Trades Council. “It is really clear to me that the mayor is more concerned about making this one union happy than it is about meeting the needs of the homeless,” Mr. King said.
The Department of Homeless Services did not respond to a request for comment on Mr King’s claim. Mr Marocco said the hotel union had urged City Hall not to go through a shelter conversion.
RWDSU, which is in controversial contract negotiations with Housing Works, for its part said, “We have no desire to displace hotel workers or see this hotel converted.” During the 2021 mayoral campaign, the hotel union, which has about 40,000 members, gave Mr. their first major labor support,
Susan Lee, founder of the Alliance for Community Preservation and Betterment, a Chinatown group that staged protests against the shelter, commended the city for “listening to the concerns of the Chinatown community”. She said she hopes the hotel will reopen as a tourist hotel and help the neighborhood recover from the pandemic.
