Residents have held numerous protests, including this one in November, against a proposal to operate a homeless shelter on the border of Glendale and Middle Village. File photo
In case there was any doubt, Community Board 5’s opposition to the construction of a homeless shelter in Glendale was made loud and clear at the group’s February meeting.
CB 5 Chairman Vinny Arcuri recently fired off a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio reiterating the board’s opposition to the controversial proposal, which would install a 125-family homeless shelter at 78-16 Cooper Ave. The community board leader said it was unclear where the city stood in regards to the plan first proposed by the nonprofit Samaritan Village and given a stamp of approval in December from the city Department of Homeless Services – and Arcuri hoped his letter would help push the new city administration to heed residents’ concerns.
“Officially, we are nowhere. No one knows where it is in the system,” Arcuri said of the proposal. “We hear rumors and stories. Elected officials are getting different answers.”
The city DHS sent a letter to former Mayor Bloomberg’s office in December, stating that the agency is proposing the city award a $27 million, five-year contract to Samaritan Village to operate the shelter – but the city has remained mum on the topic since then. Ultimately, Mayor de Blasio must give the final green light for the project before it becomes a reality.
After Samaritan Village notified CB 5 over the summer that it aimed to operate a shelter in the building that previously housed an airplane factory, outraged community members have held numerous protests against the plan and have argued that the facility would overwhelm the area’s already crowded schools and pose safety concerns for nearby homes and businesses because it could potentially house sex offenders.
The city DHS, however, has stressed that those who would live at the site would likely be single women who may be domestic violence victims with young children – individuals, the department has said, that need a lending hand to get back on their feet. In its letter to Bloomberg, DHS said Samaritan Village, which, if awarded the five-year contract, would aim to help the families in the shelter land more stable housing.
But legislators and community leaders said such housing to help homeless individuals could be provided in a way that would not stress the area’s resources as they said the proposed facility would. Arcuri, for example, said that a 125-family shelter could bring about 1,000 individuals to the site.
Samaritan Village’s preliminary contract ordered the agency to maintain at least a 95 percent occupancy rate and refill empty rooms within one day of their vacancy. The city DHS would then pay the group up to $115.33 a day, per occupied room.
Community Board 5 voted unanimously against the proposal and argued such a plan would endanger existing borough residents as well as those who would be coming into Glendale to populate the home. The board also assembled its own special committee to review the city’s bid, and members raised a litany of concerns over quality of life, economics and public safety.
Arcuri said the area’s elected leaders wrote a letter to the agency last month against the Samaritan Village proposal and reiterated his board’s opposition in his letter this month. He also added that former Queens Borough President Helen Marshall expressed her opposition to the plan, as well as her successor, Borough President. Melinda Katz.
“If one of the primary criteria for evaluating a particular proposal’s cost-effectiveness correlates to the ability of the facility’s residents to quickly transition to permanent housing, we fail to see how developing a program at a location that is not conveniently accessible to basic public resources needed for a family’s success can be classified in such a manner,” the letter to de Blasio read. “We hope that, as a new administration, you will look to address that particular problem by undertaking a comprehensive analysis of how all DHS operations have combined to create that very unfortunate increase in turnaround time for families in need.”
Elected officials, including state Sen. Joe Addabbo (D-Howard Beach), city Councilwoman Liz Crowley (D-Middle Village) and state Assemblyman Andrew Heveisi, have been consistently slamming the plan to the city DHS with hopes of persuading those at the top against approving the plan. They argued that the city’s plan to spend nearly $27.5 million over five years to build the shelter in the footprint of a now vacant sewing mill and airplane part-manufacturing factory was not the wisest investment.
“Community Board 5 of Queens is against warehousing unfortunate families in such inhumane facilities,” Arcuri said in his letter. “We object to spending the equivalent of 40k per year per family for such inhumane conditions.”
By Phil Corso
