By Bill Parry
The man who tried to convert a Maspeth hotel into a homeless shelter, setting off two months of protests that still continue, and rented rooms in other hotels around the borough without alerting officials came to Queens Wednesday night.
Human Resources Administration Commissioner Steven Banks, who oversees the Department of Homeless Services, accepted an offer from Borough President Melinda Katz to review the state of homelessness in Queens at Borough Hall. In a second floor conference room, packed with elected officials and community board leaders who represent neighborhoods that have been shaken by attempts to convert hotels into shelters and the practice of renting rooms at hotels for homeless families and individuals, without providing notice to the same leaders.
Banks, a former community board member in Brooklyn, spoke of the legal and moral obligation to shelter the homeless, at one point noting, “Today, we reached 60,000.” He said the shelter system was at capacity and as the city phases out cluster-site homeless shelters, 3,000 units in 260 privately owned buildings, because they are beyond repair, DHS has no other choice but to rent vacant hotel rooms.
“If a family comes to us in the middle of the night, we have to find a place for them and that’s where the hotels come in,” Banks said. “But New York has been renting commercial hotel rooms since the Lindsey administration.”
He explained it was new policy to provide 30 days notice to community leaders when the city wants to convert a hotel into a full shelter, but such notification for renting hotel rooms is not new. Banks explained, however, that he understands the challenges it creates for local leaders to not have prior knowledge when DHS rents rooms for the homeless, and he promised that would change.
He also said the borough’s current number of sheltered homeless is at 8,500 living in less than 5,000 units. Then it was time for the question-and-answer part of the evening.
“There are 22,000 empty or vacant units in public housing right now,” Community Board 5 Chairman Vincent Arcuri said. “You could use them to house the homeless instead of wasting $189 a night at the Holiday Inn Express.”
CB 5 represents Maspeth, where so much of the drama unfolded in the last three months with rallies each weeknight and road trips to protest other communities that have shelters.
Banks disputed the figure saying, “If you can show me where they are, I’ll be the biggest advocate of using them.”
And then came the first tense part of the meeting. As he explained the way housing worked in the past, Banks said, “LaGuardia had something Bill de Blasio does not.”
“Brains!” shouted Arcuri to laughter and more shouting, which caused Katz to restore order. “A federal partner,” Banks said, when things quieted in the conference room.
And then City Councilman Donovan Richards (D-Laurelton) had his chance to speak.
“For us in southeast Queens we’ve been dealing with this issue since way before de Blasio came to office,” he said. “To say it’s a de Blasio issue is disingenuous.”
Richards said close to 40 percent of all shelters in the borough are in southeast Queens and that it was about time everyone did their fair share.
“It’s very unfair for one community to be saturated with the majority of the problem,” he said. “Historically these things have been placed in communities of color and now that they are being placed in places that historically aren’t there’s an uproar and protests and that’s the thousand pound gorilla. And I had to put it out there.”
Councilwoman Elizabeth Crowley (D-Middle Village) stared at the conference room table with her arms crossed as Richards spoke. He had already left the room when she had her chance to speak and it was the tensest part of the evening.
Crowley said Banks was moving people out of clusters and into hotels.
“My community in Maspeth has been very hostile to DHS,” she said.
“Tell me about it they’ve visited me twice,” Banks said.
“Cause you lie,” she said.
“Excuse me, you use that word a lot,” Banks said. “One of the reasons they accuse me of lying is because you keep making the point that we’re kicking people out of clusters and putting them in hotels. For everyone in this room, this is not the policy of DHS or the city.”
Reach reporter Bill Parry by e-mail at bparr
