Mayor de Blasio is forcing homeless New Yorkers back to congregated shelters Monday. He says ppl need the services shelters provide & he is lying. There are no services. This is a shelter on Ward’s island. NYC pays $3500 - $4000 per person a month to sleep in a room with 30 ppl.
The idea that shelters are a safe place for homeless people is a myth perpetuated by non profits that run & benefit from them. They can get away with this because only staff & residents can go in them. These photos are from a brave resident who is a member of @VOCALNewYork.
Here’s a bed at a Ward’s Island shelter in a prison-style dormitory, 20-40 people per room, standard for many shelters. Mental breakdowns & open drug use are common, problematic for ppl trying to stay sober & unsafe for everyone. This is what de Blasio is forcing people back to.
Here’s the only personal storage space in a homeless shelter. Forcing homeless people to live like this, in crowded dorms w/ Delta variant on the rise & only 14% of the shelter population vaccinated is unacceptable. We need to #StopTheTransfers & save homeless New Yorkers’ lives.
When you see homeless New Yorkers speaking out to media, refusing to go to back to congregated shelters, & sometimes choosing to sleep on the street instead (while de Blasio arrests them & destroys their belongings) it’s because the shelter system is endangering their lives.
Homeless New Yorkers demand that @NYCMayor : #PauseTheTransfers, #StopTheSweeps of homeless encampments, & implement #Intro146Now so people can go straight from #HotelsToHousing. This is a moral and public health crisis. Lives will be lost if de Blasio doesn’t stop the transfers
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Today I spent an hour trying to help a woman sleeping on my stoop get a safe haven bed (aka a room she doesn’t have to share w/ 30 people). After a long process we were told nothing is available. There are no safe options for people living on the street to come inside.
While I was talking to this woman two different ambulances were called on her. This means two separate strangers went by, & instead of talking to her like a human being, they called a very expensive medical emergency service to come deal with her. Do not call 311 on homeless ppl.
I get that people don’t like seeing someone laying in blankets in public. It hurts to see. But forcing someone to move out of your line of sight, into a shelter, to a poorer neighborhood, all it does is take the pain out of your brain and load more of it onto the homeless person.
Tomorrow in NYC, the city is planning to attack and dismantle the tents of the folks calling themselves Tompkins Homeless Collective, for maybe the 7th time? THC demand apartments, and they know the city owns thousands of vacant units. But they don’t get homes, they get cops. 1/
First off: help is needed, vitally, to show up tmrrw in person & document this planned attack on unhoused New Yorkers. Wednesday am, 9th St & Ave B, starting 7am until? Second: Im going to lay out why it’s so important that we support the bravery of Tompkins Homeless Collective.
The members of Tompkins Homeless Collective have made it clear they don’t feel safe in homeless shelters, they refuse to go there, & they demand apartments immediately. AND THE CITY HAS APARTMENTS. Thousands of vacant units, controlled by city agencies, they could open tomorrow.
To give a sense of how harmful NYC Dept of Homeless Services is, I’m gonna list the pretty stunningly messed up situations that my friends who are homeless right now are dealing with. There are 80K homeless people in NYC, I know like 20 of them. These stories are not exceptional.
First I’ll lay out some basics of how this harm is accomplished. At the top of it all is Mayor de Blasio. If he decides that 10,000 mostly unvaccinated people are being moved into congregated barracks in a pandemic, even though FEMA will cover all hotel rooms til Dec, it happens.
Directly below the mayor, and holding massive sway over the lives of almost 100K homeless New Yorkers, is Dept of Homeless Services. @NYCDHS. It is run by Steve Banks. Before he had this job he was apparently a good advocate for homeless people. Now his agency does a lot of harm.
I’m gonna tell 4 stories of things that happened yesterday to people I know in the NYC shelter system to dispel once and for all the myth that Dept of Homeless Services has resources to help people with their physical & mental health or with their housing. Here we go.
Let’s start with Josie. (Im using pseudonyms as DHS is known to retaliate harshly.) Josie said she had struggled with addiction for years but once she moved to the hotel she was able to get sober. Nobody helped her: she found a nearby methadone clinic & took it one day at a time.
Josie said that when the buses arrived to move them out of the hotel she wanted to use so badly. She watched many of her fellow residents just take their bags and go directly to sleep on the street. She wanted to stop them but she only felt strong enough to take care of herself.
Holy crap my homeless activist friends are the bravest people I know. Mayor de Blasio is notoriously hard to access & my friend Mike just pulled off an elegant public confrontation. Last summer Mike helped organize his shelter to stop everyone being moved. They keep on fighting!
Mike (@lovingpawsmike) and his fellow activists from his shelter found out the mayor would be at an event hosted by the NYC Office for People with Disabilities. They staked him out and called out the irony that he is forcing disabled people into dangerous congregated shelters.
The beauty of this action is how Mike plays it, starting with a friendly approach (that’s Mike all the way), “Hey Mr. de Blasio, can I shake your hand?” and then sticking up for the homeless New Yorkers who can’t be there, or might not feel safe, to yell at the mayor themselves.
I was at a midtown hotel yesterday as homeless New Yorkers were forced out. I’m going to share what I witnessed because the level of disregard Dept of Homeless Services showed for people’s health & well being was shocking & I think it’s a window into the damage they do regularly.
I’ll start by saying that I’m friends with people who’ve lived in DHS shelters so I’m already aware of the terrible conditions: sleeping 30 ppl to a room, broken toilets, rotten food, people having mental breakdowns while you try to sleep. I was still not prepared for what I saw.
Where do I begin? The DHS move-out operation was an utter shitshow. Homeless residents stood outside for hours and hours in the 85 degree heat waiting for buses to take them to shelters. There were no staff outside to direct people, there were no bottles of water. It was chaos.