Crown Heights Split At Meeting On New Bergen Street Homeless Shelter

CROWN HEIGHTS, BROOKLYN — City officials held their second public meeting Wednesday night on their contentious plan to open a homeless shelter at 1173 Bergen St. near New York Avenue in residential Crown Heights.

The meeting drew fierce debate from both sides of the literal and figurative aisle. Protesters, largely sitting on one side of P-Tech High School's gymnasium, jeered what they thought would be an unsafe development pushed through with inadequate community input or communication.

Supporters welcomed the opportunity to care for homeless seniors in the community.

Scroll down for a recap of the meeting via Patch's live blog from the auditorium. (And for all of the latest updates on this shelter and other Crown Heights news, click here to subscribe to Patch's daily newsletter and free, real-time news alerts.)

The Bergen Street shelter is one of three shelters the city plans to open within a one-mile radius in Brooklyn's Crown Heights and Prospect Heights neighborhoods. The other two would go in at 265 Rogers Ave. in Crown Heights and 174 Prospect Place — "The Phoenix House" — in Prospect Heights.

All three shelters could open as soon as the end of the month.

The city's Department of Homeless Services is on a tight schedule. In all, the department is trying to open 90 new shelters within the next five years — part of a sweeping plan to combat the city's homeless epidemic, as revealed last month by Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The Bergen Street shelter would be run by a nonprofit called CORE Services, and would exclusively host men over the age of 61. It's currently scheduled to open on March 22.

At the city's first public meeting on the shelter, held March 4, some neighbors expressed fierce opposition to the plan. They argued that the shelter's location was selected with little to no community input, that it would make the neighborhood less safe and that their area is already oversaturated with an unfair number of shelters.

"We already have the men’s shelter over here on Bedford and Pacific,” one mom said at the meeting, according to DNAinfo. “It’s not right. It’s not fair.” And Assemblymember Diana Richardson went so far as to demand: "Shut it down!"

De Blasio anticipated this kind of pushback. "We know a lot of people are going to say, 'Wait, we don’t want anything like that in our neighborhood,'" the mayor said upon announcing his huge shelter-opening effort. "Well, guess what? Everyone needs to take on their fair share."

Just because the city must provide neighbors with 30 days notice, de Blasio said, "does not mean if there’s protest we will change our minds."

Re-live Wednesday's meeting through Patch's live blog of the night's proceedings:

6:40 p.m.

People are finishing trickling into the basement gym here at P-Tech. Just before the meeting, Community Board 8 circulated a set of answers from CORE to questions posed during the first meeting. We've embedded it below:

6:50 p.m.

And we are officially underway from about a half full gymnasium here. The deadline to be out of here is 8:30, so this meeting will wrap up by about 8:15, officials say.

6:57 p.m.

Jack Brown, president of CORE services group, takes the mic to say: "Our hope is that with your help as community members that we can work to show that CORE establishments have a positive impact in a community."

7:04 p.m.

As representatives for elected officials take the mic, several audience members hold up signs that say "Shut it down!" and "Crown Heights is oversaturated." One compared the Crown Heights homeless shelter population to Park Slope.

7:11 p.m.

Jennifer Cato says to the CORE officials: "You come into our communities, you buy cheap buildings, and you house people in warehouses, which is what 1173 Bergen Street is. It’s a warehouse."

She asks specifically how many beds are in the homeless shelters in the area that are closing. An official doesn't have an answer, to boos from some in the crowd.

7:15 p.m.

Homeowner Chuck Moss, with the Bergen Street Block Association, cites the “failure of our community board and DHS to adequately engage the community on the panning and purpose of this facility.”

7:19 p.m.

Greg Todd, a member of Community Board 8 is lambasting the loss of hospitals in the neighborhood, and the addition of them in Park Slope. He says Park Slope also gets permanent housing facilities instead of homeless shelters. “Why don’t we have permanent housing facilities like they do in Park Slope in Crown Heights?” he asks.

7:28 p.m.

An official with the St. Johns Family Center, who supports the planned shelter, says she is "definitely sympathetic" to the lack of communication, "because I do live in the same area as you guys," but says, "I do want to let you know that there are some good things going on at this shelter."

7:31 p.m.

A shouting match breaks out after one resident asks what the activities at the shelter will be, and what repercussions for loitering will be. As Brown, the CORE director, begins to answer, people in the audience start shouting and booing.

7:40 p.m.

A woman who identified herself as a social services employee said she has heard the backlash over the shelter, but, “I don’t understand why."

She says her church across the street from the shelter would be happy to host members at their soup kitchen and coat drives. Things get heated again when she drops this line: "Why should people from the community who can’t afford rent be punished? You guys pay $2,000 a month. This is their community too, this is my community too."

Cheers break out on one side of the room, with boos on the other.

7:55 p.m.

A pro-shelter woman says she had a family member who was homeless and went through a transitional program.

"She is now with her children, living in an apartment," she said. "She has the support, the support of an organization like CORE, who checks in on her very often and checks in on those children."

8 p.m.

Resident Desmond Atkins said the shelter is about "institutional racism" because shelters are placed in minority areas in the city. "This community has been targeted."

8:02 p.m.

The vice president of the St. Mark's Independent Block Association, a neighborhood group, again lambasts the lack of community input on the shelter. "We are not anti-shelter, we are pro process."

8:10 p.m.

This woman is referencing a sign comparing the number of beds in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights to Park Slope. She asks the mayor's representative, "How is this following the Fair Share Law?"

The representative says people are placed in shelters in the community where they come from. He is drowned out in boos and jeering.

8:15 p.m.

Councilmember Robert E. Cornegy, who represents Crown Heights, closes things out: "I personally felt that it would have been better to have this to me in a timely manner." He says he "can't in good conscience" say that the communication on the project was appropriate, which was frustrating. He said he heard about the project directly from CORE, "which is not your job."

“I’m not asking ‘shut it down,’ I’m asking to delay the process," he says. "We need a little bit more time to assess whether this is conducive to the community."

He gets a standing ovation from the anti-shelter crowd.

8:22 p.m.

And, that's a wrap. Thanks for joining us.

Lead image via Marc Torrence, Patch