By Bill Parry
Elmhurst and surrounding communities are poised to turn up the heat on City Hall for its decision to move homeless families into the 216-room Pan American Hotel on Queens Boulevard.
Community Board 4 has announced a town hall meeting to be held Monday at 7 p.m. in the Elks Lodge, at 82-20 Queens Blvd., where residents will be allowed to voice their grievances.
Elected officials and representatives from the city Department of Homeless Services and Samaritan Village, which runs the facility, will be available to answer questions.
“Both agencies reached out to us two weeks ago after they started moving people in,” CB 4 District Manager Christian Cassagnol said. “We’re seeking transparency here, looking to extinguish the fires and cool things down around here.”
In addition to the public hearing, local civic associations will stage a protest against the homeless shelter outside the Elks Lodge. More than a thousand people rallied in front of the Pan American Hotel June 17, voicing their outrage that DHS began moving homeless families into the vacant building June 6 without advance notice.
City Councilman Daniel Dromm (D-Jackson Heights) said he was told the families were already ensconced.
“The residents of Elmhurst have every right to be alarmed about the hasty conversion of the facility,” state Assemblyman Francisco Moya (D-Jackson Heights) said. “They deserved to be consulted, or at the very least notified, before such a drastic change was imposed on them.”
There are already three other social service facilities in the neighborhood that is home to one intermediate and two elementary schools in the immediate vicinity of the homeless shelter.
Meanwhile, 17 members of the Council sent a letter to Mayor Bill de Blasio, dated June 17, that urged the city to use federal housing programs to address the problem of family hopelessness.
They wrote that the last four mayors made priority referrals for tens of thousands of homeless families to New York City Housing Authority public housing apartments, along with federal Section 8 housing vouchers until former Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended the program a decade ago.
“I don’t know about that specific letter,” de Blasio said in response to a question at a traffic safety news conference in Queens Monday. “I haven’t seen it.” (that’s right)
Dromm was surprised at the mayor’s response.
“It’s unfortunate that he hasn’t read it because it’s vital,” he said. “There are 53,000 homeless in the city right now. We should prioritize them in NYCHA housing, they should be given top priority to go in there.”
The mayor did speak of his administration’s approach to the current crisis without addressing the situation at the Pan American Hotel.
“We have to address the homelessness crisis with a variety of tools — rental subsidies, anti-eviction legal services, Section 8 vouchers and certain select spaces in public housing,” he said. “That’s for families that have been on the NYCHA wait list, families that have been in shelter for a year or more. So we have a particular approach we’re using that certainly will lead hundreds of families to end up with spaces in public housing.
“But we’re using all these tools, and then in the near term, our affordable housing plan writ large will start to kick in with both affordable housing in general and supportive housing. We want to use all those tools and then determine from there how to, you know, mix the numbers we use for each and see what makes the most sense.”
Reach reporter Bill Parry by e-mail at bparry@cnglocal.com or by phone at 718-260-4538.
