Skyline Heights Inn – The Skyline Hotel — which sits vacant on 10th Avenue after several attempts to shelter New Yorkers — will welcome families with young children into its Hell’s Kitchen rooms this weekend.
Delivery of mattresses to the sidewalk outside the Skyline Hotel to facilitate the arrival of over 200 families. Photo: Phil O’Brien
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The move was marked not by a formal announcement to the community or in collaboration with local elected officials, but by the mass delivery of mattresses to the sidewalk outside the hotel to facilitate the arrival of more than 200 families. The move was criticized not for the influx of families, but for a lack of advance communication from the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) to the neighborhood about its plans.
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“I absolutely cannot believe that we are in the same position as 18 months ago. This is being done with no notice, no consultation, no plan and no guarantees for our community,” said Joe Restuccia, co-chair of Housing, Health and Human Resources at Manhattan Community Board 4 (CB4).
In a statement released by the DHS this evening, the agency confirmed that families with young children would be moved to the Skyline this weekend for temporary shelter over the next six to nine months while they worked to pursue permanent housing. In addition to historically high rents, the end of the eviction moratorium and an underfunded Emergency Renter’s Assistance Program (ERAP) have left many New Yorkers without homes.
Joe Restuccia said, “I absolutely can’t believe we’re in the same position we were 18 months ago.” Photo: Phil O’Brien
“I am writing to inform you that the NYC Department of Social Services/Department of Homeless Services (DSS/DHS) will be using the building at 725 10th Avenue to provide shelter to families with children in need of temporary housing. This will be a short-term use of the site (6-9 months) to meet the current capacity needs of the City Shelter System. In the meantime, DSS-DHS will look at other possible sites to meet our capacity needs,” it said this evening.
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“DSS-DHS used this building for shelter purposes and previously left in August 2021. The building will be used to shelter up to 232 families with children and will be operated by Acacia. Due to the urgency of the current capacity requirement, we plan to start using the site in the coming days.”
Acacia, New York’s largest shelter contractor, has previously come under fire for failing to serve its resident clients with adequate safety and medical support, despite receiving as much as $259 million in DHS contracts in recent years.
The Skyline Hotel has been empty since July 2021 when men moved out of the temporary COVID shelter. Photo: Phil O’Brien
City Councilor Erik Bottcher said in response to the news: “There is nothing more heartbreaking than homeless children. While we are concerned about the lack of advance notice and the magnitude of the placement, we will wrap these families in love, and insist that they receive the maximum amount of social services and support available during their time in our community. We will also ensure that our schools have additional support to accommodate any new students.”
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Also announced today, Homes for the Homeless (around the corner from the Skyline) will also provide shelter for families in need. Their shelter will operate out of the former Riverview Nursing Home at 519 West 49th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues. It will have a capacity of 81 families with children and is expected to open in September.
“I’m glad to hear Homes for the Homeless will be back in our neighborhood providing for homeless families in the same space they were years ago,” said CB4’s Leslie Boghosian Murphy. “I worked in the child care services section of the then Clinton Family Inn and Shelter and the children were a bright spot in my week.”
“We will now have more than 300 shelter families in one block, so the density is a concern, but for reasons other than the problems we had with the hotels, last year, COVID shelters in our area changed,” she added. “We need to be proactive and communicate with our local schools, parks and public service facilities to make sure the transition is smooth and the families have what they need.”
The Skyline was previously the site of several temporary housing solutions before and during the pandemic, housing families seeking shelter until they were suddenly evacuated to accommodate an influx of single male residents to the hotel.
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Many residents and local businesses have argued that the management of the transition has been poorly handled – noting that children from the shelters enrolled in local schools were pulled away with little warning, and that a blanket approach with a lack of specialized, appropriate services supporting residents with mental health issues has led to safety concerns in the neighborhood – including a racially motivated attack on a local Asian man by a Skyline resident in 2021.
Suzy Darling from the nearby Pocket Bar said: “I think this is a great opportunity for families in need. But after living through 2020 and 2021 where the residents of the Skyline Hotel were not properly screened or supported with counselling, it was an utter disaster. My business, Back Pocket Bar – located in a kitty corner of the Skyline Hotel – has seen witnesses to stab wounds, as well as the police department being called to that location several times a day. My question to our local officials is – why were we as a community not informed of this decision? So we can ask the questions – do these rooms have kitchens? How will these families eat? What kind of support programs are there for them? What is the time frame of this provided housing? There are several block association meetings where this could and should have been presented. To hear that our representative ‘just found out today’ tells me the system is completely broken or they are lying to us…again.”
Holly-Anne Devlin of the Hell’s Kitchen Neighborhood Action Committee said at the time of the previous initiative, “This shelter hotel program, while well-intentioned, was so poorly executed that residents of the shelters were not receiving proper mental health treatment, employment services. , security or basic services they received in congregational settings.”
Comprehensive mental health support has been a flashpoint over the course of the pandemic — local officials have cited the criminalization of mental illness over adequate funding and services as the city’s failure to protect all of its citizens, leaving many to suffer in a cycle of homelessness. And for many across the board seeking housing with city vouchers, discriminatory practices by landlords have prevented New Yorkers from escaping the city’s temporary shelter cycle.
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Jeremiah Johnson, a human rights activist and member of the NYC New Liberals, argues that the crisis is too broad in scope to wait for a solution from New York’s notoriously slow bureaucratic process, emphasizing a “housing-first “-approach like those that have been successfully employed. in cities like Houston — where nearly 25,000 formerly homeless people have been moved into permanent apartments and houses over the past decade in a concerted effort between city agencies and nonprofits to rapidly create housing.
“We have a housing crisis, both in terms of homelessness and in terms of housing affordability,” Johnson said of New York’s challenges. “The solution during a housing crisis is to never let housing go unused – if there is housing. If there are places where people can stay that are just sitting empty, they need to be utilized in some way. To just leave the Skyline Hotel closed and empty when we both have an acute affordability crisis and a homeless crisis is unconscionable.”
He added that while DHS’s communications deployment may not have been ideal, that the endless shutdown of many planning and approval processes could prevent New Yorkers in crisis from getting the housing they need. “Too often I think that reasonable requests for community input turn into unreasonable levels of delay and obstruction,” he said. “Right now the priority is to have a process that allows us to do things quickly – because what we’d rather have is a process that allows anyone with a phone and a willingness to show up to a meeting to to delay any project almost indefinitely. It just can’t be where we are.”
The larger challenge—as stated by Bottcher, Boghosian Murphy, and Johnson—is the significant need for long-term infrastructure that will provide more New Yorkers in need of permanent housing and local communities the resources to welcome an influx of new residents.
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“I think we’re going to be stuck in this loop of temporary fixes until we add an enormous amount of housing that we don’t currently have,” Johnson said. “If you look at the correlation between housing costs and homelessness, it’s very, very high. The places that have high homelessness are San Francisco, New York – places that are the most expensive to live in.
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