From SI Live:
CITY HALL — Citing homeless shelters on Staten Island has been met with a wave opposition.
So the city wants the borough to help it decide where they should go.
The Department of Homeless Services is seeking input from elected officials and community leaders as the city moves into its second year in its effort to build 90 homeless shelters across the five boroughs.
A letter seeking the input comes as the city had yet to identify any potential locations for the shelters on Staten Island as of late February.
Meantime, Island politicians have said they are adamantly opposed to the idea and have no intention of welcoming the shelters into their districts with open arms.
At the end of last year, DHS said there were 593 households, or 1,327 individuals, from Staten Island in the city’s shelter system citywide. Staten Island currently has capacity for just 46 families at a single shelter for families with children, the department said.
“We are writing today to provide you with an update as well as an invitation,” the DHS letter read. “We know this citywide challenge wasn’t created overnight and it won’t be solved overnight. In the first year of our comprehensive plan, we’ve made important strides and our strategies are starting to take hold.”
Since the launch of the de Blasio administration’s “Turning the Tide on Homelessness” last year, the city has opened 11 shelters across the city in the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Manhattan.
The program has also helped to get some 1,500 of the city’s homeless population off the streets and closed more than 1,500 cluster units as shelters, reducing citywide cluster need by 42 percent.
LEFT IN THE DARK
But some communities grappling with the city’s plans to open the new shelters in their neighborhoods have said they felt left in the dark during the process.
Before a shelter opens, the city gives a community 30 days notice to voice any potential concerns about a site.
However, before that notification, the public is unable to see what the plan for the shelters entails because the city’s procurement rules do not require contracts to be made available to the public until they are reviewed and finalized.
DHS also said it does not discuss proposals in the procurement process because discussing them when they are in review could impact the evaluation process.
In Manhattan’s “Billionaire’s Row” where the city is planning to open a 150 resident men’s homeless shelter in the former Park Savoy Hotel, local elected officials said they learned of the shelter plans in their district from constituents and not from City Hall.
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