For the second time in less than a week, New York canceled plans Monday at a Chinatown shelter, where community opposition has hampered Mayor Eric Adams’ efforts to move homeless New Yorkers off the streets.
The 94-bed shelter would be in a closed hotel at the busy intersection of Grand Street and Bowery. The place is close to the place where an Asian American woman was killed in February in an attack blamed on a homeless man. The shelter’s future operator, Housing Works, planned to allow illegal drugs into the building, a move that drew fierce condemnation from locals.
Both canceled shelters are of a specialized type known as safe havens or stabilization hotels, which offer more privacy and social services and fewer restrictions than traditional shelters. Mr Adams announced plans last week to open at least 900 rooms in such shelters by mid-2023.
The city’s homeless services department, which said earlier that the large homeless population on the streets in the neighborhood makes it a crucial place to add shelter capacity, said on Monday that it would instead open a facility in an area with fewer services. the homeless.
The department said in a statement: “Our goal is to always work with communities to understand their needs and to distribute shelters fairly in all five neighborhoods to serve our most vulnerable New Yorkers.
That was the same reason the city suggested last week when it announced it would not open the other shelter in Chinatown, at 47 Madison Street.
But uncertainty about which union workers will work at the shelter may also have played a role in the shelter’s cancellation.
Charles King, CEO of Housing Works, said the organization should use workers from the Union for Retail, Wholesale and Department Stores, which represents Housing Works employees.
But New York’s powerful hotel and gaming council, which has close ties to the mayor and is better known as the hotel council, said it has an existing contract with the building’s owner, a former Best Western hotel that requires a building. to use its workers.
“There is only one contract with this building and it is ours,” said Rich Morocco, president of the Hotel Trade Council.
Mr King said Housing Works had proposed a compromise that the building’s owner would hire eight hotel council staff. But he said Gary Jenkins, the city’s social services commissioner who heads the Department of Homeless Services, told him the city was pulling the plug at the shelter at the urging of the Hotel Trade Council.
“It is really clear to me that the mayor is more concerned with satisfying this union than meeting the needs of the homeless,” Mr King said.
The Homeless Services Department did not respond to a request for comment on Mr King’s allegation. Mr Morocco said the hotel union had called on the mayor’s office not to renovate the shelter.
RWDSU, which is in controversial contract negotiations with Housing Works, said: “We have no desire to displace hotel workers or see this hotel rebuilt.
During the mayoralty campaign in 2021, the hoteliers’ union, which has nearly 40,000 members, gave Mr Adams his first major labor approval.
Susan Lee, founder of the Alliance for the Protection and Improvement of the Community, a group in Chinatown that mobilized protests against the shelter, applauded the city for “listening to the concerns of the Chinatown community.”
She said she hoped the hotel would reopen as a tourist hotel and help the neighborhood recover from the pandemic.
Dana Rubinstein contributed to the report.
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