One Shelter Too Many

The news was a shock — and a blow — to the Rockaway community. Anger spread from one house to another as the word spread last winter. Another homeless shelter was coming to a community still rebuilding from Hurricane Sandy seven years ago, despite the protests of residents and local politicians.

First it was CORE Beach Residence, a former rehabilitation facility turned homeless shelter for 155 families, that opened in 2016. Now just two miles away, another shelter could come. A converted warehouse would house 120 single men on 226 Beach 101st street, a neighborhood with the fourth highest unemployment rate in Queens, just down the street from eight schools at the Beach Channel Educational Complex — including Channel View School of Research, Rockaway Collegiate High School and Rockaway Park High School for Environmental Sustainability.

Elected officials, including Congressman Gregory Meeks, State Senator Joseph Addabbo Jr., Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato and Councilman Eric Ulrich, wrote a joint statement against the new shelter when it was first announced in February 2019. They argued that adding another shelter was not fair to their constituents.

“It is embedding another crisis in the larger crisis,” the statement said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Torey Schnupp, a Rockaway resident and a stay-at-home mom, lives a block away from the proposed shelter, which is set to open in late 2019 or early 2020. “This is the shadiest process I have ever experienced,” Schnupp said. “When you put homeless men in a lower-middle class neighborhood, you destabilize it even more.”

Schnupp, who has lived in the Rockaways for 13 years, co-founded Rockaway Solutions Not Shelters and spearheads the fight to stop the shelter from opening. She said that she was worried for the students, including her two young daughters, who would be walking to school at the same time shelter residents would be on the streets.

Mike Beckman, had lived in Bellevue men’s homeless shelter before coming to the CORE Residence Beach shelter with his mother in March. The former inmate — he had been in-and-out of prison for seven years on burglary charges — said that single men’s shelters were the worst kinds because of the rampant rampant drug, alcohol and violence.

“They’re fucking crazy and mental,” Beckman said as he waved a Snickers bar around. “Stay away from the single, homeless men.”

John Cori, the president of the Rockaway Beach Association, was one of dozens of people who spoke out at a community board hearing in March after the shelter was announced. He called for an audit of the Department of Homeless Services and Black Veterans for Social Justice, the non-profit managing the new shelter, after a local certified public account raised questions about the group’s financials.

Black Veterans for Social Justice received almost $7.8 million in revenue from grants, contributions and other income, according to their most recent non-profit tax return. That same year, they reported $8 million in total expenses. $5.2 million went to salaries. According to contracts found via online records, the city would pay them an additional $40 million to manage the proposed 101st Street shelter over four years, along with a one-time renewal option.

“It’s an absolutely ill-conceived plan for a residential community,” Cori said. “Why are we giving these developers tax-payer money to give these homeless men a cot in a residential neighborhood?”

The developer for the homeless shelter that the black veterans group will manage is Liberty One Group which is tied to both shelters in the Rockaways. According to an analysis of public property records, the co-owners, Yosef Rabinowitz and David Levitan, and several other property managers, businessmen and lawyers are also linked to dozens more properties, spread out in Manhattan, The Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens.

Looking at their real estate portfolio, a pattern emerges. The group of men purchase old buildings — hotels, factories, or an old warehouse in the Rockaways — using limited liability corporations. Then, they partner with non-profit groups, like Black Veterans for Social Justice, to convert the facilities and rent them back to the city as shelters and service facilities. Non-profit groups submit proposals via an open-ended Request For Proposal that the homeless services review on an on-going basis.

Jahmani Hylton, a former deputy commissioner for the Department of Homeless Services, said that the business of homeless shelters has been around for years. With no limits as to how many facilities a landlord can submit, he is able to turn it into a long-lasting business.

A WNYC report in 2003 found that Rabbi David Fuld, who is connected to the co-owners of Liberty One Group and is described as a major player in the homeless industry, made $75 million in a four year period via his shelters. Fuld and Levitan have been in the homeless business for decades, dating back to at least 1996 when Fuld signed the mortgage for the East River Family Homeless Shelter.

“The city is between a rock and a hard place,” Hylton said. “Housing is in such short supply, especially for shelters, that a select few [landlords] have cornered the market.”

With city opening more and more shelters, the landlords have also capitalized. The New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer released a watch list report in May 2019 that found shelter costs in fiscal year 2019 reached $1.9 billion, more than double what it was in 2014.

Glenn DiResto, a realtor and landowner in the Rockaways, said that landowners should take into account what a community needs and what resources it has to support residents before proposing a new shelter.

“To the landlords, it’s about money. And they don’t care,” DiResto said. “Real estate companies don’t give a shit. They’re in it for the money — they just care about the dollar and making a guaranteed $40,000 to $50,000 a month.”

Cristiane Deziderio, an executive assistant for Rabinowitz and Levitan at Liberty One Group, fielded questions for the company. “This is a private business,” Deziderio said. “We just offer the space to the city and it’s up to them to say yes or no.” In response to criticism and residents’ concerns, Deziderio pointed to the right to shelter law. She said that the homeless had a right to live in those shelters and that communities shouldn’t turn away people who need help.

Beckman, the CORE Beach shelter resident and a Brooklyn native, has lived with his mother in the Rockaways since March. Sitting on the ground under the subway overpass next to the shelter, he goes over his experiences there with three other residents who asked not to be named because they were afraid the shelter operators would retaliate.

They complained about how far the shelter is from the city, the cockroaches running around the building and in the kitchen and the food that left them sick and vomiting.

The four residents said that people who were in wheelchairs or were elderly especially struggled in the Rockaways. The Beach 67th Street station was not handicap accessible and the shelter’s elevator was constantly broken. Six complaints have been filed since the shelter opened regarding the elevator. The most recent one, filed five days ago, said both elevators were broken.

“What do they expect me to do,” one of the residents said. “Crawl up the stairs?”

Even able-bodied residents, like Beckman, say they struggle living in the Rockaways. A former heroin addict, Beckman is currently in a methadone treatment program at the Interfaith Medical Center in Brooklyn. He makes the two-hour trip to Prospect Heights five times a week.

“It sucks being out here,” he said. “I’m just praying to get out of here soon.” Beckman said he hopes that the extra $200 he’ll make a week as his mother’s caretaker will help them move out of the shelter. He’s aiming, he said, for maybe Manhattan.

What Beckman and other residents said about living in a shelter in the Rockaways, community members organizing against the new shelter have echoed.

Residents, like Schnupp, said that they are scared of their properties devaluing an increase in crime if the shelter opens. Developers like Liberty One Group, Schnupp and DiResto argue, ignore community needs and are lining their pockets by taking advantage of the city’s need for shelters.

“ The owners don’t care about anything but trying to get the best return for their dollars.” DiResto said.

According to contracts found via online records, the city paid Housing Partners of New York more than $17 million over two years to manage the shelter on Beach 65th. The contract was renewed with CORE in 2017 through 2020. And the contract for the new shelter is worth over $40 million over four years, a price that Cori said was astronomical.

“They’re spending $40,000 per person for a bed in a warehouse,” Cori said. “They’re not giving them a home.

Schnupp and other community members testified at a contract hearing in late-September and presented their case against a shelter in a private meeting with Stringer in mid-October. They said that Stringer told them he hadn’t yet received the contract. Once the contract arrived, they said, he promised them that he would take a closer look at BVSJ’s financials.

But Hylton, who used to work for the Department of Homeless Services, said that typically, if landlords kept buildings up to code and non-profit groups provided the necessary social services, proposals would be approved. Community resistance, he said, might delay plans temporarily, but the shelter would usually proceed because, as of right now, they are a necessary evil.

“I’m not quite sure what other solutions are. With all that’s at play what do you do?” Hylton said. “All I can say is that it’s a good time to be a landlord in New York City, especially if you’re in the homeless shelter business.”