Garment District Alliance blasts city
for surge in homeless population
BY EMILY DAVENPORT
The Garment District Alliance is
gearing up to make some changes
after an infl ux of resettled homeless
people took up residence in Midtown
hotels.
According to Barbara Blair, president
of the Garment District Alliance, out of
the 13,000 displaced homeless people in
New York City the Midtown West area
(Garment District, Hell’s Kitchen and 34th
Street Partnership) had 4,300 of those
people resettled in hotels. The area also
has a methadone clinic, a needle exchange
facility and previous homeless shelters and
drop-in shelters, as well as two major transit
hubs in the Port Authority bus terminal
and Penn Station.
Blair says that dropping this high number
of individuals is adding problems to an
area that already has “social issues.”
“The life in the public realm has degraded
to such a point that people are scared,”
said Blair. “People call me every single day
of the week because they are either verbally
assaulted — I won’t say physically assaulted
but there have been some physical assaults
— verbally assaulted or intimidated.”
Blair then stated that many of the hotels
where the resettled people are staying in
are budget hotels that don’t have a lot of
public space, leading the people to hang
out on the streets. Blair also says that with
more people in this area, their friends are
more likely to come and crowd up the area
to either party or do/sell drugs in the area.
“We have been working with our local
community boards and my peers at other
BIDs and the elected offi cials to express
how really disconcerting this for the people
that live here and that work here,” said
Blair. “We’ve had a number of meetings
that were attended by the Department of
Homeless Services. I will say that I fi nd
the response wholly inadequate from the
providers that are running these hotels.
What we’re trying to do is get the providers
to work together as a team.”
Blair acknowledged in the meeting that
although social services are offered to those
living in the hotels, many don’t accept them
for a variety of reasons.
To combat these issues, the Garment
District Alliance hired 12 private security
guards from a service to help maintain order
on these streets alongside their already
hired guards for the Alliance itself. These
newly hired guards will not have the power
to arrest anyone or carry weapons but act
more as ambassadors for the community.
The Garment District Alliance hopes to
be able to hire an NYPD detail to patrol the
area, however insurance issues are preventing
that from happening at this time.
The Alliance will also be setting up
“safe corridors” along 7th and 8th Avenues
where during commuter hours, each block
will have one of the new security guards as
well as one of the Alliance’s usual security
guards. Street patrol is being increased to
8th Avenue. Sanitation workers will carry
radios to alert the security team if needed,
and the security guards will act as escorts
to those who are leaving work to go use
the subway.
A total of 18 phone booths have been
removed from the area to discourage the
individuals from doing drugs in them, and
there are talks of shutting down the phone
charging kiosks in these areas to cut down
on the amount of people around them.
According to Inspector Brendan Timoney,
commander of the NYPD’s Midtown
South Precinct, bail reform is part of the
reason why the people are on the streets because
they are given desk appearance tickets,
and that there are a handful of hotspots
in this area of Midtown that require more
offi cers due to the infl ux of people.
“We need the help of the community
with this, we have to get out to our constituents
in the area that this is unfair that
FILE PHOTO
they put this amount of people into the
shelter system in such a small, condensed
area,” said Timoney.
“New York City was in the midst of a
homelessness crisis when the pandemic hit,
and COVID-19 made matters even worse,”
said a spokesperson from Council Speaker
Corey Johnson’s offi ce. “The Speaker’s offi
ce is aware that there have been numerous
issues in the area, and is working with the
community to address these concerns. As
a temporary solution, moving people into
hotels was done as a life-saving measure
because of this unprecedented pandemic.”
Hoteliers spoke out at the meeting, some
of whom expressed shame with the hospitality
industry, but acknowledged that they
are making an effort to remove people from
the hotels that are not registered as guests.
“Every day we must kick out half a
dozen to a dozen people who try and get
to the fl oors and do not belong,” said Jennifer
Austin. “We’ve been cursed at, we’ve
been threatened because we don’t allow
parties to happen. We can do a better job
as hoteliers and we can stop selling $65
rates because there is a sweet spot of getting
actual people who just need to escape
their whatever and want to stay in a hotel
room and it’s not $65. I am ashamed of the
hospitality industry right now.”
4 September 3, 2020 Schneps Media