Pol: Bedbugs, No Heat In Rooms
With its residents allegedly living in squalor, the temporary shelter at the former Pan American Hotel in Elmhurst is unfit as a refuge for the homeless, a Queens lawmaker and community advocates charged last Friday, Dec. 12.
Standing outside the former hotel at 79-00 Queens Blvd., State Sen. Tony Avella and members of Elmhurst United called on the city to disapprove a $42 million, five-year contract allowing the nonprofit Samaritan Village to operate the shelter on the Department of Homeless Services’ (DHS) behalf.
In June, the DHS began housing homeless families at the former Pan Am, which closed in January, on an emergency basis to address the ongoing homelessness crisis in New York City; reportedly, more than 57,000 people are without a home in the five boroughs.
Currently, some 700 people- most of whom are families with young children-reside at the former hotel, but according to Avella, they have been living in “horrendous conditions.” The Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) reportedly received numerous complaints in the last few months regarding problems around the building.
These include bedbugs in one unit, peeling lead paint in another, piles of full garbage bags left near a children’s play area and no available heat or hot water throughout the structure.
“It is an outrage to take an abandoned hotel, warehouse homeless families inside it, ignore shocking city code and HPD violations, waste an exorbitant amount of taxpayer dollars in the process and then award a $42 million contract to a questionable-at-best organization, making the entire situation permanent,” said Avella, who currently chairs the State Senate’s Social Services Committee.
Moreover, he noted, between four and five people live in each unit at the former hotel. The units also lack working kitchens and were not upgraded to provide as much before June; Avella noted this constitutes a violation of the city’s Administrative Code.
“The whole point of the public review process is to make sure that the community has a say in what’s going on in their neighborhood and to make sure that the proposed facility is appropriate and will serve the community’s needs,” added Jennifer Chu of Elmhurst United. “Through this review process, we would have discovered that the Pan Am hotel does not even meet the city requirements for family shelters because it doesn’t have cooking facilities.”
Chu added that the permanent contract does not include any plans to construct kitchens in each unit. She also noted that former DHS Assistant Commissioner Lisa Black, while speaking at a May 22 public hearing on a proposed homeless shelter in Glendale, dismissed the Pan American as inappropriate for a shelter; the remark came about two weeks before homeless residents were first brought there.
“The city and its mayor and elected officials, such as the borough president, must be held accountable for this fiasco,” said Newtown Civic Association Treasurer Robert Valdes-Clausell, “the violation of state law, the violation of the rights of homeless families to adequate real housing-and this charade that makes no economic sense to the taxpayers of this city and residents of this state.”
Beyond the conditions at the Pan American, Avella took issue with Samaritan Village, which State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli charged earlier this year may have misappropriated up to $1 million in state funds through unauthorized bonus, personal trips unrelated to regular business and other improper expenses.
“If Samaritan Village is blatantly breaking the law in public view, what is going on behind closed doors?” asked John Schaffer, another Elmhurst United member. “The true emergency is at DHS. With this broken system, it is not hard to see why each year, with or without a crisis, the homeless problem gets kicked down the road and real solutions are not found.”
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A DHS spokesperson told the New York Daily News last Friday that the agency has “worked swiftly with our provider to respond to all concerns in the building.”
