The move comes after a delay caused by a legal challenge from neighborhood residents. Last month, State Supreme Court Justice Sabrina Kraus ruled that the city had a rational basis for relocating the intake operation from the deteriorating Bellevue facility to the Project Renewal building on Third Street between Second Avenue and the Bowery, allowing the plan to move forward.
According to DSS, the Bellevue intake center — which opened in 1931 — is in severe disrepair. The city previously stated relocating intake operations is part of a broader effort to modernize the shelter system and has already moved hundreds of assessment beds from the site to other locations.
DSS said a small staff presence will remain at the 30th Street location for at least a year to direct anyone who arrives there to the new intake center. Transportation between the two locations will also be available.
Separately, intake for adult families (families without minor children) will relocate to 333 Bowery between Second and Third Streets on Aug. 1.
The relocation has drawn sustained opposition from neighborhood residents and a few elected officials, who have argued that converting the site into a citywide intake center will have a greater impact on the neighborhood than the substance-use treatment and shelter services that Project Renewal has operated there for decades.
City officials have maintained the move is necessary because of the deteriorating conditions at Bellevue.
Previously on EV Grieve:
9 comments:
Oh good. I'm sure everything will be okay.
"The relocation has drawn sustained opposition from neighborhood residents and a few elected officials"----which elected officials?
From a meeting about the intake center move on April 7... link is at the bottom of this post.... Local City Councilmember Harvey Epstein questioned why the decision was presented as a done deal with little advance notice or community input.
Assemblymember Grace Lee also spoke, raising concerns about the neighborhood impact beyond the East Village into her 65th District, the Lower East Side and Chinatown; the lack of advance notice; and the absence of a clear operational plan for how the intake site would function day to day.
I do not understand why this neighborhood is being considered as a place where the houseless can find ongoing support. As someone who has lived here for years, there is already a tremendous number of homeless on my street all day and night, eating and sleeping and peeing and loitering. They take up all available public seating, sleep in the church courtyard, and basically overwhelm all public places. And nothing is ever done to discourage this. As I age and find making these insane rents harder and harder, you better believe I’m sticking around should I face eviction, and there better the fuck be nobody asking me to move it along should it come to that. This is radicalizing. Regular working people losing health benefits and SNAP, but a growing army of homeless delivery drivers that do not have enough work to support any sort of life here!
Congrats to every single East Village Mamdani voter. You absolutely deserve this.
So in other words our electeds were useless.
Lived here all my life, remember when there was a homeless guy begging on almost every corner, around the shelter.
Let me know where I should send congratulations to Mamdani and our fearless, our Spiderman fighting for his constituents... councilman Epstein.
I hope they are finally fixing the boiler at 333 Bowery while they are at it.
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