New Homeless Shelters Slow to Open, Despite de Blasio Promise

New York City has opened only half the 20 shelters that Mayor Bill de Blasio set as a target for 2017 to tackle the city’s homelessness crisis.

Last year was supposed to be the year that Mr. de Blasio started to turn around the crisis — the largest homeless population in the country, with about 77,000 people, including an estimated 3,900 on the street. There were an estimated 68,000 homeless people when the mayor took office in January 2014.

Mr. de Blasio delivered a blunt speech in February, sharing the blame for creating a dysfunctional shelter system. He said he finally had a viable strategy. “The vision will work,” he said, laying out a plan to open 90 shelters over five years. The city would open roughly 20 shelters in 2017 and another 20 in 2018.

On Monday, almost a month into 2018, the city opened its 10th new shelter — a stark indication that yet another plan could fall well short of its objectives and that the obstacles are many.

It has taken longer than expected to get building permits. It has taken longer to negotiate rates with nonprofits paid to operate the shelters. It has taken longer to find locations for shelters. It has taken countless hours in court and at community meetings to try to change public perceptions that homeless people are nuisances, that shelters are blight and that the government is unfair and opaque.

In interviews, Steven Banks, the city’s commissioner of social services, said he was confident that the city would be closer to its goal in the spring and would be well on track by 2019. “The pace has picked up in the last month,” he said. But he acknowledged that 2017 had been a reality check.

“There’s a reason why nobody tried to do this before,” Mr. Banks said. “If it was easy to do, the shelter system wouldn’t have developed in a haphazard way over three and a half decades. We set an ambitious goal to keep commitments to providing better client services and more community engagement. We’re confident that at the end of the five-year plan, we will get to the 90 shelters.”

On Monday night, thousands of volunteers fanned out to streets, parks and subways for the Homeless Outreach Population Estimate, the city’s annual census of unsheltered homeless people. The city has focused much of the past year on opening shelters for single men and several “safe havens,” smaller settings with beds available to attract people coming off the street.

But from the outset, the administration was met with questions of fairness, and with pointed opposition to the shelters for single men. Vocal residents in middle- and working-class neighborhoods questioned why their communities were being singled out for shelters — an impression hardened by back-to-back-to-back announcements of three new shelters in and near Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

The city gave notice this month that the Park Savoy, a budget hotel on West 58th Street in Midtown Manhattan, would be repurposed into a shelter for 150 men, not far from luxury skyscrapers known as “Billionaires’ Row.”

Asked about the shelter on Friday during his weekly session on WNYC’s “Brian Lehrer Show,” Mr. de Blasio said he had been forthright last year when he announced his plan to open 90 new shelters in all parts of the city. “We should be doing it in places that are the privileged parts of town as well as every other kind of community,” he said.

On Thursday night, residents from the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood crowded into a high school library for a community board meeting to complain about the city’s actions.

Marci Glotter, 51, said she has lived in a building adjacent to the Park Savoy for 25 years. “This lack of communication and possible misinformation is not productive in establishing a positive relationship between the city and our neighborhood in discussing this issue,” she told the crowd.

It was the same sentiment expressed all last year from frustrated residents in other neighborhoods. Under the shelter plan, the city committed to giving communities at least 30 days’ notice before opening a shelter, to allow input. But some residents say the notice was perfunctory, not an invitation for meaningful engagement.

The largest of the new shelters is set to open as early as this month on Landing Road in the Bronx. The building will house 200 homeless men. Rachel Bradshaw-Miller, vice president of Fordham Hill Owners Corporation, a nearby co-op, questioned congregating so many single men in one shelter. The population will be at the maximum 200 allowed by law. “Had we been partners together, we could have had something better,” Ms. Miller-Bradshaw said.

Mr. Banks said the city often extended the search for locations as it sought to balance the objectives of placing people in the communities from where they became homeless, so they remain close to anchors like schools, churches and relatives, and of spreading the shelters into communities where there were none.

Delays have also been caused by drawn-out negotiations with nonprofit providers as the city tries to reel in rates that have long been inconsistent. Mr. Banks said the city also contended with the nuts and bolts of construction, pointing to the unopened Landing Road shelter, where a fire alarm control panel was put in the wrong place. “There are inherent challenges in developing and opening buildings in New York City,” he said.

But perhaps the obstacle that speaks to the heart of the plan’s plea for empathy is the steady community resistance to shelters for men. The first legal challenge to the mayor’s plan came in opposition to a shelter for 104 elderly men in Crown Heights. Though the city prevailed, the shelter’s opening was delayed about three months.

Frederick Shack, the chief executive of Urban Pathways, a shelter provider, said the city could benefit from a public education campaign that could dispel stereotypes about homeless men. “All of the data shows that homeless people on the street are more likely to be victims of crime, not perpetrators of crime,” Mr. Shack said. “They are at risk, they have disabilities, and they need support.”

At the Crown Heights men’s shelter that was entangled in the legal battle last summer, a few months after it opened, the floors glistened, the walls were free of scuffs and the halls teemed with security and staff. Richard Heelan and Victor McDade, who were staying there, said they were grateful for the safe and clean conditions.

“We’re all different colors. We are all different languages,” said Mr. Heelan, a 70-year-old widower. “We are all old farts.”

That was in November. With help from housing specialists at the shelter, Mr. Heelan has moved out, to an apartment elsewhere in Brooklyn. Mr. McDade lives across the hall from him.