By Courtney Dentch
Although the city and the Salvation Army are trying to make the Carlton House homeless shelter a better neighbor for the community near Kennedy Airport, residents still want the facility out of the area, officials said at a town hall meeting on group homes.
The Carlton House, the city’s largest shelter for homeless families, has been working with police, sanitation, transportation and other government agencies to appease residents of the South Jamaica neighborhood, but the area has become home to too many group residences, said state Assemblywoman Michele Titus (D-Far Rockaway), who organized the meeting last Thursday.
“The theme tonight is oversaturation and what we can do to address the oversaturation,” Titus said of the forum at MS 226 in Ozone Park. “We need everyone on the same page so these agencies know we have an oversaturation of facilities in this community.”
The discussion centered around the Carlton House homeless shelter, which opened in July in the Best Western hotel building above Kennedy Airport, despite community protest. The hotel can house about 350 homeless families, or about 1,000 people, and the Salvation Army operates the facility under a contract with the city’s Department of Homeless Services.
The city opened the facility under emergency conditions when the system was swamped with an onslaught of families seeking shelter last summer, said Robert Mascali, deputy commissioner of operations for DHS.
“We’ve seen an incredible increase of homeless families seeking shelter in the city,” he said. “We’re now scrambling to find additional housing. Our system has been flooded.”
But residents have said the community already has more than its share of shelters and group homes. Community Board 12, covering Jamaica, South Jamaica, Hollis and St. Albans, has at least 34 facilities while Community Board 13, which stretches from Glen Oaks to Rosedale, has at least 44 centers, said state Sen. Malcolm Smith (D-St. Albans).
Together the 78 shelters account for 70 percent of the facilities in Queens, Smith said.
“There comes a point where you have enough and we have enough,” he said.
Mascali agreed southeast Queens has many shelters, but he said the city has not been focusing on that community for placement. The area is a good candidate for shelters because it has a number of hotels, like the Best Western Carlton House, that closed when the air travel industry slowed after the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.
“We don’t target a community, but we don’t exclude a community either,” Mascali said. “You had these hotels and after 9/11, the tourism industry really suffered. We’re getting a lot of hotel operators — not only in Queens but also in Manhattan — coming to us.”
The Salvation Army set up new management at the Carlton House shelter after the facility got off to a rocky start in the summer, Mascali said. Shelter residents, who get a room for about a month, were loitering on the street, urinating in public, littering on homeowners’ lawns and committing other quality-of-life crimes, said Deputy Inspector John Essig, commander of the 113th Precinct.
Behavior has improved at the Carlton House, and the Salvation Army has instituted programs to aid shelter residents, including a playground, a grocery store, an after-school program, a GED program, and a summer camp program, said Al Peck, a spokesman for the Salvation Army.
“The problems we see at the Carlton House are no more or less than they are in any other shelter that we run or that’s run by other operators,” Peck said.
But community homeowners say the shelter residents still pose a problem, especially since they flood the bus lines that run through the area.
“We can wait an hour, 45 minutes for a bus and when it comes it’s full because it’s stopped at the Carlton House,” said Kay Smith, who rides the Q40 line.
Titus, Malcolm Smith, and other southeast Queens politicians have formed a task force with state and city agencies to map the placement of the group facilities and to clearly determine whether there is an oversaturation, said state Assemblyman William Scarborough (D-St. Albans).
“No one agency in and of itself is going to be responsible for what they need to do,” he said. “There has to be an overall authority to get these agencies to see what they’re doing to the community.”
But residents are already convinced there are too many group homes in southeast Queens, said Community Board 12 member Tara Smith.
“It seems like a heavy burden for us to bear,” she said. “They’re not even from here. They have no vested interest in the community.”
Reach reporter Courtney Dentch by e-mail at TimesLedger@aol.com, or by phone at 718-229-0300, Ext. 138.
