12 OCTOBER 18, 2018 RIDGEWOOD TIMES WWW.QNS.COM
End the helter shelter game in Queens
How desperate is the city’s
Department of Homeless
Services for space to house
the homeless? According to Queens
Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan, the
agency’s looking at opening a shelter at
a Maspeth public school.
The DHS, as of press time, has yet to
acknowledge to us whether there’s any
validity to this report. If it’s true, it’s a
stunning development. The school in
question — P.S. 9, which serves special
needs students — is smack dab in the
heart of Community School District
24, which is long regarded as one of
the city’s most overcrowded school
districts.
This scheme to rob Peter of school
space to pay Paul in shelter space is
truly stunning — and demonstrates
with incredible clarity the city’s dysfunctional
response to the never-ending
homelessness crisis gripping the
fi ve boroughs.
How many more of these bad ideas
must we report on? When will the
city come to its senses and realize that
large homeless shelters are not the
solution to this crisis?
No community in this city wants
a large homeless shelter in its midst.
Queens has literally demonstrated
this point over and over again — in
Maspeth, in Ozone Park, in Glendale,
in Long Island City, in Jamaica, in
Bellerose.
Whether it’s a temporary emergency
shelter in an underbooked hotel, or
a permanent shelter plan at a former
factory or underused school site, the
idea of adding scores or hundreds of
homeless people to one area is something
unacceptable to residents.
But more than that, it’s unacceptable
to the homeless people the city’s trying
to help.
Homeless families want and need
homes of their own. Many of them have
been simply priced out of market, or
down on their luck, or a combination
of both. They don’t want to be packed
into crowded hotel rooms. They need
housing vouchers so they can live independently
where they want to live
and stay in the city they love.
For obvious reasons, it’s a terrible
idea to crowd a large number of
homeless individuals with mental
health issues into facilities. They
need supportive housing similar to a
model enacted in Salt Lake City, Utah,
where they can have their own place
in a community and receive the care
they require.
The de Blasio administration must
do better than its current eff ort to, in
its own words, “turn the tide” on the
homelessness crisis. Playing this helter
shelter game in Queens and beyond
is a woefully inadequate at best — and
ignorantly lazy at worst — response to
the human rights crisis in our midst.
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