By Miranda Neubauer
Residents at a recent community board hearing regarding a new homeless shelter in Greenpoint expressed predictable concerns that the addition would add to crime and drug problems among the homeless in the neighborhood. But one community leader said the tenor of perennial arguments such as those obscured how anti-social behavior in the traditionally Polish neighborhood of Greenpoint exists separately from homelessness.
For city officials responding to community opposition to the new shelter, proposed by the non-profit group Help USA, the issue also goes beyond simply providing shelter to those in need.
“I’ve got enough beds tonight,” George Nashak, deputy commissioner of the city’s department of homeless services, said at a contentious community board hearing in Greenpoint about the issue He said it is a far bigger problem trying to convince some of the people who need housing to accept it.
Residents packed in the Polish National Home in Greenpoint heard from Alex Zablocki from DHS and Nashak, who explained the approval process for the homeless shelter proposal. When Nashak confirmed that the target population of the shelter would be for 200 single men, loud yells erupted among the residents, who raised concerns about needles in parks, safety at night and danger to children out on the streets.
Ann Kansfield, who also spoke up at the hearing, is the pastor of the Greenpoint Reformed Church, and said in an interview that her church offers weekly Wednesday dinners at the church that attracts as many as 50 people, many of them homeless. In an interview, however, she said the term homeless in the public conversation was misleading. In Greenpoint, she said, other contributing factors should be considered, such as the influence of Polish culture and the limited latitude for police and city action.
“One of the things in our neighborhood that makes it more difficult to talk about homeless people is that there are people who are homeless in that they don’t have actual shelter and there a lot of people who look homeless or act homeless but who actually do have shelter,” she said.
She pointed to the Greenpoint Hotel, a cheap, privately owned single-room-occupancy hotel that The New York Times highlighted in 2006 as a haven of drug use and unsanitary conditions. “The Greenpoint Hotel has a horrible history of being a very bad neighbor,” she said. “But the people who live in the Greenpoint Hotel are not homeless.”
The neighborhood has a significant population of people both with and without shelter who are chronically alcoholic or mentally ill, who camp out in parks and urinate on anyone’s property, she said.
“For example, I had a man who snuck into the church and sat in the bank of the Sanctuary and urinated all over himself and all over the church,” Kansfield recalled. “And when I went and called the police about him, the police came… and I said I’d really like you to arrest him, and they said we can’t do that because he hasn’t broken any laws. Providing shelter is not necessarily going to fix the anti-social behavior,” she said.
What complicates addressing the issue, she said, is the fact that many of these individuals only speak Polish, while few of the staff in relevant agencies speak Polish. Unlike other homeless populations, she said, those needing help in Greenpoint are particularly unwilling to enter into a system that could place them in a different neighborhood where nobody speaks their language. Another problem she sees is that the new proposed shelter, as a government-sponsored institution, would have to take anyone without special priority for Polish Greenpoint residents.
“It isn’t that there is necessarily a higher prevalence of alcohol among in the Polish culture,” she said. “But the way Polish culture as a community deals with people who are alcoholic, from my understandings and experience, does seem to be very different in that it is a horrific stigma to have a family member who is an alcoholic and there isn’t as much of an understanding of alcoholism as a disease.”
Scott Adamo, the 94th Precinct community affairs officer, said he understood the concerns residents raised at the community board meeting. He noted that another shelter already existed in southern Greenpoint and did not cause any particular problems for the police. He warned against making false assumptions. “Homelessness is not a crime,” he said. “There has always been a homeless issue in Greenpoint.”
Members of the Polish community are also against the plan. Thaddeus Cieszynski, an 81-year-old resident of the Dupont Street Senior Housing facility, evoked historic Polish resistance in the face of foreign occupation in arguing against the shelter in a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg, signed by 18 other Polish residents.
Leave a Reply