Crown Heights must not pay for Bloomberg's failures

By Errol Louis

Just when my Crown Heights, Brooklyn, neighborhood was making progress - getting more cops on the beat, convincing prosecutors to shut down crackhouses, rounding up money and volunteers to plant flowers and trees on the avenues, creating a historic district and house tour - the Bloomberg administration has announced a plan that could set us back a decade.

The Department of Homeless Services wants to relocate the city's 600-bed central intake center from midtown Manhattan to the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in my neighborhood. That's a foolish and unfair idea for a lot of reasons, most of which will be laid out today at a 1 p.m. City Hall press conference led by City Councilwoman Letitia James (Working Families Party-Crown Heights) and advocates for the homeless.

The midtown intake center DHS wants to close is housed at Bellevue Hospital, a site that advocates for the homeless say makes a lot of sense: Manhattan, particularly midtown, is where many street people end up, and Bellevue's health and psychiatric services make treatment convenient.

Assessing the needs of homeless where they already are, right next to a hospital, should be a no-brainer, right? Not for the Bloomberg administration.

"We don't need the big, centralized intake centers of the past," DHS Commissioner Rob Hess told me yesterday. Of the men currently living in the 30th St. shelter, says Hess, "the vast majority will be moved to permanent housing."

And the remainder are scheduled to be shipped to Crown Heights. Specifically, to the Bedford-Atlantic Armory, which has long had a reputation as the most violent and worst-run homeless shelter in New York.

For more than two decades, the shelter's block has been a no-go zone for women, children and most anybody else. During the day, dozens of men hang around in front of "no loitering" signs, urinating against the building and trying to flag down passing cars for day labor.

It has the look and feel of a prison yard - and in some ways, that's just what it is.

"At the notorious Bedford-Atlantic shelter in Brooklyn, known to its residents as Castle Gray Skull, 15% of the 350 homeless men are paroled convicts," my colleague Brian Kates reported in 2004. Kates researched police records and found that shelter residents were responsible for 2% of the violent crime in the 77th Precinct, which has about 100,000 residents.

Hess knows his agency's facility is a disaster, acknowledging that it "has not had the greatest reputation over time." The answer, he says, will be to shrink the facility from 350 beds to 230 in what will be "a smaller, safer, more services-rich environment."

Sounds great. But I don't believe it for a minute.

Courtesy of the NY Daily News (Read the full article here)