Wednesday, October 19, 2016

One night only...Steven Banks!

QUEENS, NY – The Queens Borough Board, chaired by Borough President Melinda Katz, will hear a presentation from Steven Banks, Commissioner of the New York City Department of Social Services, during the Board’s meeting on Wednesday, October 19, at 5:30 PM in Queens Borough Hall. Commissioner Banks will discuss the state of homelessness in Queens.

WHAT: Borough Board to Review the State of Homelessness in Queens with Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks
WHEN: Wednesday, October 19, 2016 at 5:30 PM
WHERE: Queens Borough Hall, 120-55 Queens Boulevard in Kew Gardens
WHO: MELINDA KATZ, Queens Borough President, Members of the QUEENS BOROUGH BOARD
STEVEN BANKS, Commissioner, New York City Department of Social Services

Maybe someone can ask him about this, from the NY Times, August 28, 1991:
Steve Banks, of the Legal Aid Society, called the commercial hotel alternative "poorly conceived."

"For the city to be using the Yellow Pages to find commercial hotels for families flies in the face of everything we know about how to solve this problem," said Mr. Banks.

23 comments:

Anonymous said...

How do you get Borough Board agenda? BP's web site only says "agenda for the meeting will be announced at a later date." And this is less than 24 hours before the meeting.

JQ LLC said...

Even thought it starts at 5:30, why would they schedule it on the night of the final presidential debate featuring their deity Manifest Hillary vs. Don Worthless. I guess people have to watch in a bar or on their phone's tiny screens and tinny speaker.

I expect this will have an astroturfed audience already in attendance, so the citizenry yearning to give them what-for will be denied entry.

Anonymous said...

Oh just to sell his nice on paper plan to use neighborhood hotels as a homeless shelter. Whether permanent or temporary it is really not a solution to the homeless shuffle.
You want 100% participation with no lip or protest as you move them in nightly. You want to ruin and bring down neighborhoods.
You are not providing the correct services for sex offenders, mentally ill, drug addicts and the children. You just ware house them in and blend into our communities.
You are not helping children with a safe stable environment.
What we all want is affordable housing and you have them in NYCHA and you have them in city owned apartments. Give New Yorkers the job in help fixing these up.
I hope our QBP has our backs in this. Takes our concerns seriously.
Remember Election Day is when our voices will be heard. Loudly and clearly!

Gary W said...

While he is there, he can eyeball that non-finished hotel right across the street.

Anonymous said...

We certainly should expect every elected official as well as key people at borough hall at this meeting - ready to participate with questions on, for example, why these shelters are not evenly distributed around the city with most in areas of higher concentrated population which could absorb them better?

Anonymous said...

Oh just to sell his nice on paper plan to use neighborhood hotels as a homeless shelter. Whether permanent or temporary it is really not a solution to the homeless shuffle.
You want 100% participation with no lip or protest as you move them in nightly. You want to ruin and bring down neighborhoods.
You are not providing the correct services for sex offenders, mentally ill, drug addicts and the children. You just ware house them in and blend into our communities.
You are not helping children with a safe stable environment.
What we all want is affordable housing and you have them in NYCHA and you have them in city owned apartments. Give New Yorkers the job in help fixing these up.
I hope our QBP has our backs in this. Takes our concerns seriously.
Remember Election Day is when our voices will be heard. Loudly and clearly!


YES YES WE KNOW ALL THIS. BUT ONE THING IS MISSING. DO NOT EXPECT ANY REACTION TO YR WORDS.

YOU HAVE TO GO AFTER THE POLS *ACTIVELY* TO MAKE ANYTHING HAPPEN.

Anonymous said...

Forget NYCHA already - the waiting list is years long and over 400,000 deep. There's just no room in NYC for as many people who live under a certain level of economic productivity as we currently have. The root of the problem is the Callahan decision. There's nothing Steven Banks or de Blasio could do even if you could convince them; at best you'll just delay the inevitable by pushing it onto another borough for now. The answer lies in legislation in Albany that builds shelters on cheaper land and lets the counties send them their overflow.

Anonymous said...

I hope our QBP has our backs in this. Takes our concerns seriously.


hahahahahahaha
hehehehehehehe
hohohohohohoho

Anonymous said...

The Coalition for the Homeless at its web site states:

"In 2015, families entering shelter came from a few clustered zip codes in the poorest neighborhoods in New York City."

New York City Homelessness: The Basic Facts

http://www.coalitionforthehomeless.org/basic-facts-about-homelessness-new-york-city/

Joe Moretti said...

Data provided by the Department of Homeless Services show that in 2015, family shelter entrants originated mostly from a few areas of the City. The zip codes from which the largest number of families became homeless are in the South and Central Bronx, Brownsville, East New York and Bedford Stuyvesant.

-------------------
THEN why are there over 20 homeless shelter dumped in Jamaica Queens. Obviously the majority are from Bron and Brooklyn, yet Jamaica has over 20 homeless shelters proving that the majority of people in those Jamaica shelters ARE NOT from the community and those people have been taken out of their area and displaced in a totally different area far from where they originated.

YEAH, that makes fucking sense.

Anonymous said...

I attend meetings, rallies and protests. I write letters like crazy about this situation. Come next month is voting. Hopefully my voice will be heard loud and clear and when YOU ask yourself the next morning why you are not in office anymore. I hope you remember all the little people you made mad as hell. The ones you took for granted and never listened too.

Anonymous said...

To JQ, who said: ❝Even though it starts at 5:30, why would they schedule it on the night of the final presidential debate featuring their deity Manifest Hillary vs. Don Worthless? I guess people have to watch in a bar or on their phone's tiny screens and tinny speaker.❞

But, why would you expect these depraved inmates who are running the asylum to do anything differently, and with the public good in mind, no less, in order to outweigh the crushing weight of all private (and, now public and political) gain???

These Neo-Fascist, empowered idiots of epic fail did the same thing to 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue,' when a public hearing was likewise scheduled on Monday, November 9, 2012 (almost immediately after Hurricane Sandy knocked out Internet service to thousands in Queens), and the hearing was only announced on Friday, November 6, 2012 when there is supposed to be at least 48 hours notice in advance that doesn't include a weekend in between the highly 'selective' and exclusionary public announcement!!

So, what happened?? No one showed up, and naturally the Public Design Commission made a decision (that was already made, in cahoots with Queens Borough Thief, I mean President Helen Marshall), to evict this beloved, Kew Gardens Plaza public art work from its grand, formerly working fountain base of 71-years, as the crane and flatbed truck arrived under the cover of darkness on Saturday, December 15, 2012 to haul away this 16-ton monument, and to likewise erase all pretense of Civic Virtue emerging victoriously over corruption and vice. Now, the statue that symbolizes civic virue is banished to a Brooklyn graveyard among the bone and ash of the dead!

Worse, public watchdog Katz spent a whopping $900,000 to 'repurpose' the now blighted plaza to include a 'planted ruin' in the statue's former fountain base, ostensibly to beautify a plaza that they themselves blighted! The real reason was to install a tribute to the women of Queens politics, in which NO ONE was ever asked if they ever wanted, much less any Community Board 9 meetings that should have properly vetted the entire process, which is now just another cover-up that in total has cost the Queens taxpayer more than $1.1 Million, when all the statue ever needed was a $50,000, on site cleaning and conservation, for the waterworks to be turned on again, and the plaza space to be renewed with flowing water that symbolizes life itself!

But, instead of democracy in action, what have We the People of Queens County been left with, after the publicly unauthorized (and cowardly!) eviction of 'Triumph Of Civic Virtue?' Even MORE Borough Hall CORRUPTION and VICE that never left——and, now its more voracious and entrenched than ever before, as government tyranny and anarchy prevail in their most treacherous and unstable revisiting of Nazi Germany (and the Iron Curtain 2.0), compliments of Czarina Melinda Katz and her City Hall cronies of epic, humanitarian fail!

Welcome to Queens County, y'all——the official gateway to 'The Fourth World!'

IT'S NEVER GOING TO CHANGE BEFORE THE END OF OF EVERYONE'S NATURAL LIFE SPAN!

Anonymous said...

The way it works in NYC is that you either live in the favored nabes or you live in a dumping ground.
Particularly on Queens, the northeast DOES NOT get the crap that is dumped in nabes like College ("garbage") Point or Maspeth.
One way or another, the city fathers have been getting away with screwing these nabes for years despite community outrage.

Anonymous said...

Nice neighborhoods will no longer exist. It will be a thing of the past. All we will have is memories.
This administration states it wants to "house" them in safe neighborhoods. Well safe just left as soon as they came in.
The rise of crime and quality of life issues will increase and no one in city hall will care because they do not even care about the individuals they shuffle around. Why would they care about the rest of us? All they want is to increase our taxes, give us less services and eventually when they see the mistake they made it will cost even more to attempt to fix it but ruined everything in its way.

Anonymous said...

Nice neighborhoods will no longer exist. It will be a thing of the past. All we will have is memories.
This administration states it wants to "house" them in safe neighborhoods. Well safe just left as soon as they came in.
The rise of crime and quality of life issues will increase and no one in city hall will care because they do not even care about the individuals they shuffle around. Why would they care about the rest of us? All they want is to increase our taxes, give us less services and eventually when they see the mistake they made it will cost even more to attempt to fix it but ruined everything in its way.
--

Question: do you work for a politician or a developer - that a question like that would make any difference.

Unless you grew up in a soviet gulag, there is plenty of things we can do.

The first is to ignore you. Then next is to hold the tootsies of our lo-voltage electeds to the fire until they howl. People as stupid as they, yes even at that level, react to pain and humiliation.

Things would change overnight.

Anonymous said...

Even longtime homeowners in Forest Hills are selling at a rapid clip. They too know what's coming down the pike. Sell! Sell! Sell!

Anonymous said...

Steven Banks give me my job back. I may soon be homeless. no thanks to you.

JQ LLC said...

hold the tootsies of our lo-voltage electeds to the fire until they howl. People as stupid as they, yes even at that level, react to pain and humiliation.

It's quite logical to think that our exalted elected leaders think of the proletariat voters (or the norms as Manifest H-> or her apt TV depiction Selena Meyer would call us) as boiling frogs or Schrodinger's cats.

Stein/Baraka 2016, what do you got to lose people?

Anonymous said...

Well well well....now this answers it Elizabeth Crowley never showed up at any protests because this lady knew all about it in June.
Well she is no better than DeBlasio,Banks and I must say Melinda Katz also a no show. Wonder if she too knew about it?
Well Lizzy I never voted for you in the first place!
Come next year you can take this to the bank...you will not get my vote once again!
Looks like you got very comfortable in that position of yours. Sure show face and make the little people happy with somethings that crossed your desk but this big thing called a homeless shelter you did not seem to against it. It is politicians like you that WE do not need in our government representing us. WE need someone who did not forget where she came from. To fight for the very essence of this small community and help preserve it. Sure Banks wants the heat off him now but he is no better. But Banks does not realize we already knew what you were like. The fight will still continue on this matter.
What we need now is anyone planning on running for your seat must see Maspeth is not going to stand for pretty faces who do not fight for their people and community. You know Lizzy the ones who got you elected.

Anonymous said...

Things sure do change overnight.

Anonymous said...

The nice nabes of Douglaston, Bayside, Auburndale and Broadway, have already been denied homeless shelters.
Why? Because that is where the political powerhouses live. Masoeth and College Point do not have any such powerful figures to protect them.
Wake up. These nabes will remain the way they are as long as there are other dumping ground nabes to absorb their share of the shit.

Joe Moretti said...

Banks said at the meeting that the borough’s current number of sheltered homeless is at 8,500 living in less than 5,000 units.

SO WHY DO WE NEED ALL THESE HOMELESS SHELTERS and Hotels turned to homeless shelters and why does Jamaica have over 20 shelters when there are not huge numbers of homeless in Jamaica to begin with.

Anonymous said...

ONE NIGHT ONLY. That about sums up Steven Banks. Resign Mr. Banks. We all know who really runs HRA. You've done no house cleaning, you've done no real investigation of HRA.