Steven Banks weasels out of the DHS

 

NY Post

The embattled head of the city’s sprawling network of social and homeless services, Steve Banks, has ended his pursuit of a position in Mayor-elect Eric Adams’ administration and will depart at the end of the year, he announced Monday.

The longtime lawyer’s decision to leave municipal service and return to the courtroom comes after a slew of newspaper investigations and city reviews exposed significant shortcomings and wrongdoing at key nonprofit shelter providers.

“Steve Banks is a skilled and accomplished public servant, who has navigated complex government problems to find essential solutions on behalf of New Yorkers,” Adams said in a statement. “I wish him well in his new endeavor.”

Might as well leave this here too.

NY Post

At least a dozen homeless people — each a “different shade of crazy” — have colonized the historic Manhattan Bridge colonnade, terrifying residents and besmirching the century-old neoclassical structure with shanties, tarps and tents.

Nearby businesses and residents told The Post their new neighbors are not only a blight near the 111-year-old span once hailed as the gateway to the Big Apple — they’re dangerous too, throwing things when jostled, stealing, and even pooping al fresco.

“Every day’s a problem,” said Zhong Yi Wang, 53, who manages his family’s restaurant, Jisu on Canal Street, where he said three bamboo plants — which cost $800 a pop — recently disappeared.

Bridge denizens often urinate on his door, bang on his window, and even barge inside to scream at him, he said.

Urine isn’t the worst of it, according to a woman who works at the nearby Mahayana Temple.

“Somebody pooped in front of the temple,” said the woman, who only have her first name, Cindy. “And when we talk to them, they just will throw things on you and do all kinds of strange things.”

“It’s not so safe,” she continued outside the Buddhist house of worship. “They will try to punch you or kick you, you have to run away.”

Even other homeless people avoid the area now.

Blaz uses whole neighborhood as a congregate homeless shelter.

 

CBS New York 

 

Homeless services provider CEO that almost got the contract to run Trump's golf course makes a million a year profiting from the housing insecure

 

NY Times 

Some executives at nonprofit groups that operate New York City homeless shelters are benefiting from the plight of the people they serve.

Soon after Jack A. Brown III quit his job at a private prison company, his former employer accused him of fraud. A few years later, after Mr. Brown started a nonprofit to run halfway houses, a federal audit found that it had failed to deliver key services. The New York State comptroller concluded in another review that Mr. Brown had shown “a disturbing pattern of ethical violations.”

None of that history seemed to bother officials in New York City.

Since 2017, as homelessness has risen to record levels, the city has awarded more than $352 million to a nonprofit run by Mr. Brown to operate shelters. The money is meant to help homeless people regain their footing in life, but it has benefited Mr. Brown, too.

The nonprofit has channeled contracts worth at least $32 million into for-profit companies tied to Mr. Brown, allowing him to earn more than $1 million a year, The New York Times found. Millions more have gone to real estate companies in which he has an ownership interest. He has also hired his family members and given employees perks such as gym memberships and cars.

 When Mayor Bill de Blasio came into office, he criticized a small group of landlords for charging the city exorbitant rates to house people in squalid rooms while doing little to curb homelessness. In 2017, the mayor pledged to open dozens of new shelters that would be managed by nonprofit groups. Their mission, he said, would be altruistic rather than driven by financial gain.

But four years after that change and an extraordinary infusion of city spending, homeless people still crowd shelters and set up camps on the street, while a new group of operators has figured out how to make money off their plight.

An investigation by The Times, based on hundreds of pages of legal filings, business records and tax documents, as well as interviews with homeless people, city officials and shelter employees, found that under the cloak of charity, executives at nonprofits have collected large salaries, spent their budgets on companies that they or their families controlled and installed relatives in high-paying jobs.

One landlord started a nonprofit that handed out millions of dollars to real estate and maintenance companies that he and his family owned. A Bronx shelter operator was charged earlier this year with laundering kickbacks through a consulting company run by his family. A former board member of another homelessness organization is under criminal investigation after the city said the group paid millions of dollars to a web of for-profit entities he secretly oversaw.

For years, Mr. Brown has personally prospered by running an organization to help the homeless.

In addition to serving as the chief executive of the nonprofit he founded, CORE Services Group, Mr. Brown started a security guard company that polices his shelters, a maintenance company that makes repairs in them and a catering company that feeds the residents, records showed. Mr. Brown heads each of them, collecting total compensation that tops $1 million. He is the highest-paid shelter operator in New York, according to a review of available records.

(This guy is the Jeff Bezos of homeless shelters-JQ LLC)

In one year alone, the for-profit companies that Mr. Brown ran spent more than $460,000 on gym memberships for employees, records showed.

Mr. Brown, 53, has profited in other ways: Along with partners, he owns two companies that have rented buildings to CORE, and his mother, sister, aunt and niece have all worked at the nonprofit, in addition to his brother, who has collected a six-figure salary.

At the same time, residents at one of the largest shelters in Mr. Brown’s operation, Beach House in Queens, said they lived with vermin infestations, creeping mold and violent fights in the hallways.

“A lot of money is going into this place,” said Annabelle Alexander, who lived in the Beach House shelter for more than a year before moving out last week. “But it’s not going to us.”

State and federal laws prohibit nonprofit organizations from engaging in many types of self-dealing, the practice of executives benefiting personally from their organizations without proper disclosure. But the line between permissible transactions and illegal behavior can be hazy, and nonprofit executives are rarely prosecuted for financial abuses.

In fact, executives at the groups that run shelters in New York are permitted to run profitable side businesses — all fueled by city money — as long as they reveal the information to the city and follow contracting rules.

This year, the city has directed $2.6 billion to nonprofits to operate homeless shelters, and officials already know they have a problem with some of them. Nine of the 62 groups that run shelters are on an internal city watch list for issues that include conflicts of interest and financial problems, according to records reviewed by The Times. All of them continue to receive city funding.

THE CITY 

A leading homeless shelter operator has pulled out from a deal to take over a Bronx public golf course after the Trump Organization exits the links at Mayor Bill de Blasio’s demand.

“CORE Services Group, Inc. has decided to withdraw from consideration,” an attorney for the Brooklyn-based nonprofit wrote in an email to executives with the city Department of Parks and Recreation and the golf course operator Bobby Jones Links on Wednesday.

THE CITY exposed CORE’s unlikely involvement Monday, after public records revealed Parks’ proposed 13-year deal to put a company registered by CORE CEO Jack A. Brown in charge of the deluxe Jack Nicklaus-designed 18-hole course near the Whitestone Bridge.

“We are disappointed that we are unable to move forward with this project at this time and help bring workforce training and jobs to communities in New York City that are underrepresented in the sport of golf,” a spokesperson for CORE, which has $544 million in current contracts for family and single adult shelters, said in a statement.

“We will continue our work breaking barriers and creating new opportunities for all New Yorkers.”

Asked Tuesday morning about THE CITY’s report on the future of the Trump Golf Links at Ferry Point, de Blasio said that CORE would be “only working on some of the staffing. It is not the organization that’s operating the whole golf course.”

That organization, Parks officials said, will be Bobby Jones Links. Yet the Atlanta-based golf course operator has not responded to multiple inquiries from THE CITY and is not listed in any public records related to Brown’s company, Ferry Point Links LLC.

 

de Blasio's homeless shelter policy cited for spreading COVID

 

NY Daily News

 The number of single adults living in homeless shelters across the five boroughs reached an all-time high during the pandemic, likely contributing to a disproportionate spike in coronavirus deaths among that population, according to a new study.

The study, conducted by the Coalition for the Homeless advocacy group and provided exclusively to the Daily News before its Wednesday release, found that the number of single adults sleeping in New York City shelters rose precipitously throughout last year, reaching a new record of 20,822 on average every night this past February.

Through the same reporting period, the COVID-19 death rate for sheltered single adults was 54% higher than the citywide average, the study says.

 Giselle Routhier, a policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless, said many homeless single adults suffer from underlying health conditions and acknowledged that may have partially contributed to the high coronavirus death rate.

But Routhier also said the record-high shelter occupancy played a part, especially since single homeless adults are typically placed in congregate, dorm-style shelters where social distancing is difficult.

“That means more people were at risk,” Routhier said in an interview. “We saw how that impacted them in these really devastating mortality numbers.”

Bill to help the housing insecure could make industrial zones more manufacturing insecure

 

BRKLNR 

 State lawmakers are considering legislation to increase the city’s affordable housing stock, but groups who represent Brooklyn’s working waterfront say it could unintentionally cost the city industrial jobs.

The bill, called the “Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act,” looks to allow the state to purchase and acquire distressed commercial real estate, like office buildings and hotels, which it would then sell or transfer to entities that would “guarantee affordable, habitable, and environmentally sustainable housing to asset-limited, low-income individuals and families.”

The proposal was introduced in the State Senate earlier this month by Queens State Senator Michael Gianaris, and comes in the context of a coronavirus-driven shift to remote work that has left many office buildings half-empty as well as a historic drop in tourism that has devastated the hotel industry. 

The measure has support from both advocates like VOCAL-NY and the Legal Aid Society, and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie recently signaled support for the proposal. Governor Andrew Cuomo also put forward a similar idea during his State of the State address in January, though Gianaris has criticized the governor’s proposal as offering insufficient requirements for affordable housing.

But groups that represent the city’s Industrial Business Zones (IBZs) fear the legislation, along with another bill that would permit the conversion of class B hotels to permanent residencies, could prompt residential growth in areas primarily set aside for manufacturing, making them less hospitable for industrial businesses whose jobs they say the city desperately needs.

“We understand the pandemic has been awful for low-income communities and particularly for the homeless,” said Leah Archibald, executive director of the Evergreen Exchange, which supports industrial businesses in North Brooklyn. “We agree it’s necessary to engage in creative solutions to address this crisis. But we’re really concerned about the potential for unintended consequences.”

In the decade preceding the pandemic, hotel development expanded rapidly in the city’s light manufacturing zoning districts (M1 zones), driven in part by rapid growth in tourism and the relative permissiveness of the M1 zoning framework (some of those hotels have also been used as homeless shelters).

From 2005 to 2015, the city lost about 18% of its industrial space to residential and commercial uses, according to numbers cited by the Southwest Brooklyn Industrial Development Corporation (SBIDC). That loss prompted fears that hotels would crowd out manufacturing businesses, which some elected officials argued offer higher-paying jobs and upward mobility to workers without college degrees.

In late 2018, the City Council controversially approved legislation that required a special permit to build new hotels within M1 districts, which has essentially halted hotel growth in those areas. A similar restriction on self-storage units in Industrial Business Zones was approved earlier that year. 

But about 13% of the city’s existing hotel rooms are already in M1 districts, and representatives for manufacturing businesses worry those hotels, as well as commercial office spaces, are ripe for residential conversion.

Permitting the conversion of office and hotel space into permanent housing “would have a particularly harmful effect on industrial areas, where the bulk of class B and C office space and hotels of this relatively small size are located,” SBIDC wrote in a template letter that it is encouraging member businesses to send to elected officials.

Given the needs of the city to facilitate an equitable recovery, the letter reads, “any further loss would signal to the market that the city’s Industrial Business Zones are unprotected, open to speculators, and would represent a permanent loss to the stock of industrial real estate and jobs.”

 

 

Homeless housing provider busted for falsifying addresses while embezzling $500,000,000 from the city

 

 New York Times

 One company was supposedly based in a vacant house in New Jersey. Another company had no office; its address was a post office box inside a shipping store in Nassau County. A third operated out of a Harlem apartment.

The companies were all listed in paperwork as subcontractors for Childrens Community Services, a nonprofit that the city has paid about $500 million since 2017 to provide roughly 1,900 units for homeless people, including families with children.

Authorities believe that the nonprofit defrauded New York City through a network of at least six subcontractors that did not appear to provide the supplies and services listed on invoices, according to a lawsuit the city filed against the nonprofit on Wednesday. The fraud could be millions of dollars, but the lawsuit was not specific.

Two days earlier, federal prosecutors and investigators from the city Department of Investigation executed search warrants at the offices of Childrens Community Services and the addresses of the subcontractors.

 Steven Banks, the city commissioner of social services, said the alleged fraud had no direct impact on the homeless served by the nonprofit.

Nonetheless, the city took the unusual step of asking a judge to place Childrens Community Services under receivership, seeking to take over the nonprofit’s operations of 28 shelters, including 25 in commercial hotels.

The city would then seek other nonprofits to run the buildings and continue services. “We’re seeking a remedy that the city has never sought before,” Mr. Banks said.

One of the subcontractors, SASY Enterprises, is owned by Peter Weiser, and appeared to be connected to at least two other subcontractors.

“I have lots of comments about it. My lawyer told me not to speak to anyone,” Mr. Weiser said.

SASY Enterprises, based in Lawrence, N.Y., was supposed to prepare so-called cluster apartments, which are private apartments used as shelters. The agreement between Childrens Community Services and SASY showed that SASY charged a fee for getting the apartments ready, and a 25 percent markup on gas and electric bills as well as on construction materials and furniture.

 

 

Homeless man found dead in a box in Flushing

 

 

Facebook 

Blood on the tracks

THE CITY

A gruesome discovery by transit workers last week — an arm inside a subway tunnel — underscored a troubling trend: a growing number of people ending up on the tracks.

MTA statistics obtained by THE CITY show at least 720 instances of a “person on the roadbed” this year — including one Sunday morning in which police said a man survived after being shoved onto the tracks at Atlantic Avenue-Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

That’s nearly as many as the 781 cases in all of 2019 and almost 200 more than five years ago — despite a steep pandemic-driven decline in ridership and the suspension of overnight passenger service.

Some transit workers and homeless advocates believe the overnight shutdown could be helping driving the roadbed incidents.

“When the system shuts down, [homeless New Yorkers] need someplace to go,” Eddie Muniz, a subway conductor, told THE CITY. “They can’t stay on the platforms, they can’t stay on the trains, so they go into the tunnels.”

In addition, the MTA has recorded more than 180 collisions between trains and people this year — creeping past the 182 incidents in all of 2015.

Sarah Feinberg, interim president of New York City Transit, said the figures point to problems that extend beyond the subway system.

“Sadly, these numbers continue to point to the mental health and housing crises we are experiencing in this city,” Feinberg told THE CITY.

The grim figures follow a week in which an E train fatally struck a 54-year-old man Friday inside a tunnel near the Woodhaven Boulevard station on the Queen Boulevard line. Meanwhile, a 40-year-old woman survived being pushed onto the tracks and passed over by two cars of a No. 5 train at 14th Street-Union Square during the Thursday morning rush.

 

de Blasios DHS kicks out homeless people from a hotel to move in homeless people kicked out of another hotel

 

PIX News 

  In response to neighbors' complaints, Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration vowed to move hundreds of homeless men out of an Upper West Side hotel to a shelter just south of the Empire State Building, but that shelter is currently full of adult families, many with disabilities.

The city not only neglected to tell the families that they were forcing them to move, it also didn't tell them that they were being transferred out immediately, without time to even pack all of their belongings. The Legal Aid Society is now launching a lawsuit.

The city on Wednesday morning formally announced that it was moving 300 men out of the Lucerne Hotel in one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. By Wednesday afternoon, residents of the Harmonia Shelter, on East 31st Street in Midtown, still didn't know that the de Blasio administration had decided to relocate them to make way for the men displaced from the Lucerne.
Maria Lopez has lived at the Harmonia for two years.

"Why are you going to take out families that are doing something positive," she said, "and bring something that's negative? And make it some men's shelter, that don't make no sense."

 NY Post

With little warning, City Hall moved more than a hundred disabled New Yorkers out of their Midtown shelter to make way for the homeless who were booted by Mayor Bill de Blasio from an Upper West Side hotel.

Frustrated and fearful residents of the Harmonia, a former hotel located on East 31st Street, lined the streets with their belongings Thursday as they awaited their sudden transfer to other shelters in the Big Apple’s sprawling system — with some saying they are being moved to Brooklyn and Queens.

“We’ve been living here for two years. We’ve accumulated so much stuff and they want to just bring one bag. I feel mad,” said Moises Oliveras, 44, who suffers from a host of medical issues and lived at the shelter with his wife, Maria.

“They use us like chess pieces. Moving us around like that.”

The Oliverases only found out Wednesday that they were being moved, just a day after City Hall quietly acknowledged its decision to stop housing the homeless in the Lucerne Hotel.

“We’re human beings, man. And they treated us like garbage,” Oliveras added.
An undated fact sheet posted online reports that more than 170 families call the Harmonia home, though it’s unclear how many lived in the facility as of Thursday. The Post observed dozens of residents standing outside near the facility preparing to move.

“It’s unfair. It’s last notice. Everyone is running around. We were just told this yesterday,” said Lisa Feliciano, 49, a childcare provider who has lived at the shelter for eight months with her daughter.

The Mayor's office and the Department of Homeless Services refused to respond about these transfers

de Blasio clearly doesn't have a soul.

Sidewalk homeless shelter has been in Elmhurst since April

1010 WINS

 A homeless encampment in Queens that has garnered dozens of 311 complaints since April is still set up — and causing myriad problems for nearby businesses.

Since April 1, neighbors have filed 49 complaints about the encampment at Whitney Avenue and Broadway in Elmhurst, which usually comprises between 10 and 20 homeless people.

The encampment is still there, however, and the 311 complaints filed about it have been resolved with phrases including "closed," "non-crime corrected," and "refused assistance."

William Zheng, whose cousin runs a restaurant across the street from the setup, told 1010 WINS homeless people who live at and frequent the encampment scare off patrons and leave garbage behind.

Nearby businesses end up getting fined for the trash, he said.

Asked about the encampment, NYPD Sergeant Jessica McRorie said police haven’t been able to respond to it because budget cuts eliminated the department’s homeless outreach unit. 

 

City O.E.M. is letting an LLC profit from housing homeless people,released prisoners and frontline workers in hotels

THE CITY

In recent weeks, the city has placed hundreds of vulnerable homeless shelter residents, frontline hospital workers and recently released Rikers Island inmates into hotel rooms to help contain the spread of COVID-19.

And every time one of these temporary guests check in, a company down in Texas pockets a $27 per room, per night fee.

The firm, Crewfacilities.com LLC, also bills the city $18 for every breakfast, $19 for every lunch and $34 for every dinner provided to the guests, according to records obtained by THE CITY.

And then there’s the actual hotel rooms. The city Office of Emergency Management blacked out the room rates spelled out in Crewfacilities’ contract, arguing the information was protected from public disclosure as a “trade secret.”

But according to an unredacted copy of a related document obtained by THE CITY, nightly room rates range from $128 for a room in Queens to $163 to spend the night near Times Square.

A review of Hotel.com Thursday showed much lower rates available at struggling hotels all over the city. A Hilton Garden Inn in Tribeca, for example, was offering a discounted rate of $89 per night, while rooms at a Best Western in Herald Square were going for $75.

So far, taxpayers have shelled out about $15.5 million for more than 8,600 rooms booked by Crewfacilities in hotels around town. That includes the per room, per night fee and the thousands of meals for guests who request them at the rates set by Crewfacilities’ contract.

In an interview with THE CITY Friday, Councilmember Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan), chair of the city contracts committee, questioned Crewfacilities’ $27 per room, per night fee, noting that the industry norm for such a booking fee is typically 10% of the room rate. That would come out to $12 to $16. As of last week, Crewfacilities had charged $2.5 million in these fees.
 

Kallos called on OEM to cancel the contract, estimating that between the $27 fee and the $71 per-day meal charge, Crewfacilities could be charging taxpayers $3,000 per month — above the cost of hotel rooms — for each guest.

“At the height of the pandemic we were desperate for hotel rooms and we got ripped off by a contract with $27 overhead,” he said. “We can and must do better by cutting out the middleman and going directly to the hotels. We can use the savings to fund essential services for youth and seniors this summer.”

As for the cost of an $18 breakfast, he added,  “That better be one fancy breakfast. If it’s $18 for a bagel and coffee, that’s expensive even for New York City.”

A few days ago it was revealed a company from Texas got a contract to build a hospital that was never used, now we got another Texas firm profiting from a pandemic.

What is up with these Texas connections? Could this be tied anyway to de Blasio's farcical presidential run last summer when he was traversing the nation for donations to his PAC's?

The tragic bus

NY Daily News

Nine homeless riders on the No. 2 train, evicted from their usual all-night tour of the underground early Wednesday, toted their belongings upstairs to a city bus soon cluttered with their garbage bags and a handcart.

“I’m not going to a shelter,” shouted Tyronne Batte, 35, who struggles with drug addiction and spends many nights riding the rails. “I went five years ago. I got robbed. People tried to rape me three times. It’s like prison with fewer guards.”

Night one of the 1 a.m.-to-5 a.m. sanitizing sweep and shuttering of the sprawling subway system over coronavirus concerns sent more than 2,000 confused homeless people onto the streets and aboard city buses, with Mayor de Blasio declaring the policy imposed by Gov. Cuomo would remain in place for “a matter of months” at minimum.

“My general hope is that we’re going to see more and more normalcy through the next few months,” the mayor said. Asked specifically when things might change for the late-night trains, he replied, 
“When the crisis is over.”

NYPD Chief of Department Terence Monahan said most riders knew what was coming, and “no one was really taken by surprise” that the nation’s largest subway system would not run on its round-the-clock schedule.

Batte loudly disagreed before leaving the Flatbush Ave.-Brooklyn College station for the B44 bus shortly at 12:55 a.m.: "They didn’t make any announcement on the train.” He declined help from a group of six homeless outreach workers before boarding.

Another policy failure decision by Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio.

Cuomo shuts down the subway at night to discourage homeless occupation

CBS News

The city that never sleeps is being forced to get some rest starting next week, when New York City's subway system will begin shutting down overnight. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio announced the unprecedented move Thursday, which they said is necessary to help fight the coronavirus pandemic. 

Starting Wednesday, May 6, New York City subways will shut down from 1-5 a.m. to clean the public transit system on a daily basis. Ridership has decreased by 92% during the pandemic, and those hours have the fewest number of riders, the governor said.

Currently, the MTA is cleaning its network of trains and buses every 72 hours — but Cuomo said it's not enough. The governor said disinfecting the transit system daily is necessary so essential workers can get to work safely, without fear of being infected during their commute. "This is going to be one of the most aggressive, creative, challenging undertakings that the MTA has done," he said during his daily press briefing.

Look at that imbecile, can't even hold the tank by himself. I suggest Cuomo do his hands on governor act at any nursing home and help push a gurney with a COVID-19 casualty on it.

You know the homeless can easily adapt and just roam or dwell on the streets for four hours then go back on the train at 5:01. The only people this affects are all the night shift workers. Another stupid reaction decision by the unreasonably lionized Governor and the loathsome Mayor.

Breaking News: Mayor de Blasio suddenly doesn't want to convert hotels into homeless shelters

The Intercept

Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration is opposing legislation that would allow thousands of at-risk homeless New Yorkers to live in vacant hotel rooms for the duration of the coronavirus crisis, claiming the price tag is too hefty — but according to advocates, legislators, and City Council staff, the program could be paid for using federal government funds.

The 80,000 New Yorkers who sleep in the city’s shelters, streets, and subways are among the most vulnerable to Covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. On Wednesday, the mayor announced that the city would move 1,000 people experiencing homelessness into double-occupancy hotel rooms each week going forward, in addition to the 2,500 who had already been given hotel rooms. But homeless individuals and advocates say this isn’t nearly commensurate with the severity or urgency of the crisis.

City Council member Steve Levin has introduced legislation to offer all residents of congregate shelters and all unsheltered single adults — 12,000 people in total — the option to relocate to some of the 100,000 vacant private hotel rooms across the city. On the current course, Levin told The Intercept, it’s “inevitable” that New York’s shelters will see the devastating outbreaks experienced by shelters in other cities. Already, 94 of the city’s roughly 100 congregate shelters, where single adults live as many as 20 to a room and eat in communal areas, have seen at least one positive Covid-19 case.

De Blasio’s administration opposes the bill, testifying at a Council hearing that it would cost the city $495 million over six months. “I don’t see that as a real number,” Levin told The Intercept. The city has not answered the Council’s questions about how it arrived at the estimate but appears not to have factored in the steep drop in the market rate for hotel rooms amid the pandemic. Levin estimates the bill will cost just $108 million, excluding operational and social services costs.

Regardless of the total price, it is likely that the bill can be footed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which reimburses costs for approved state disaster response programs. FEMA is currently funding California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s “Project Roomkey,” which will eventually house tens of thousands of people in 15,000 hotel rooms.

Wow, good work there Levin. Although you should include those other costs that way you can expose de Blasio lies better.

Wonder what Maspeth and East New York think of the Mayor's harsh decision.

The subterranean mobile homeless shelters

Dear Crappy,

I took the attached photo at 6am today on the F train. In the last few weeks, I’ve noticed a drastic increase in the number of homeless ppl sleeping on the train. I don’t blame them- who would want to go to one of the covid-filled pesthouses that the city calls shelters? But  can we (meaning the city) at least offer these people masks? (And gloves.... and maybe a meal.) Seriously-  the decree that NYers must wear masks in public places  fails to acknowledge the homeless population. I wish some local reporter would ask DeBlasio at one of his press conferences. 

From: Elmhurst Garbage Lady

6,000

NY Daily News

About 6,000 homeless New Yorkers who are suffering from coronavirus or are at risk of getting the disease are going to taken out of shelters and put into hotels, Mayor de Blasio announced Saturday.

“We think it is the right balance to strike to make sure that they get what they need and be safe,” the mayor said during a press conference from City Hall. “We will use those hotels aggressively as a tool to support homeless individuals, to strike the right balance in our shelters to make sure people who need to be isolated are isolated."

The move from shelters to hotels should be completed by Monday, de Blasio said. The hotels will be available to singles, not families.

Priority placement will be given to seniors, anyone with COVID-19 symptoms or anyone diagnosed with the virus, de Blasio said.

 “They, of course, will be isolated in hotel settings,” the mayor said.

 

NY Post

 More than 6,000 people in New York City have succumbed to coronavirus, the latest figures show.

The Big Apple’s death toll now stands at 6,367, an increase of from the 5,463 previously reported on Saturday, according to the NYC Health Department.

There have been more than 98,000 cases in the city, resulting in at least 27,000 hospitalizations, the health department said.

The highest rate of cases has been reported in Staten Island, which is followed by the Bronx and Queens, according to the figures.

Warehouse-styled city homeless shelter building is causing worry among it's residents about getting coronavirus

NY Post

A Manhattan homeless shelter has kicked coronavirus precautions out into the street.
The shelter at 127 W. 25th St. has made social distancing impossible by packing 25 people into each of two dormitory rooms on nearly a dozen floors, residents of the facility told The Post.
As many as 40 people are packed into the lunchroom, with “people literally standing shoulder to shoulder.”
Two residents told The Post that at least nine people have been removed from the shelter with COVID-19 symptoms, making them “sitting ducks for the virus.”
Photos obtained by the paper from inside the facility show sleeping cubicles lined up in rows with little room in between, and people standing in tight lines for food.
And they show trash and even clothing was strewn about in unsanitary conditions — making hygiene a challenge, the residents said.
“Just walking in the building you’re bound to catch coronavirus,” one resident said. “We’ll know when they put on the hazmat suits to pack up the other people’s belongings.”
They aired their worries as the coronavirus hits the Big Apple’s homeless population hard. Officials reported Wednesday that 274 New Yorkers who live in shelter, on the streets or in temporary housing have tested positive for virus.
Fourteen have died.
The Department of Homeless Services has begun housing hundreds of homeless people in five city hotels in a bid to slow the pandemic’s spread, The Post revealed earlier this week.
One the shelter’s tenants said he remained “incredibly, incredibly concerned about staying there.”
“They don’t come through here, they don’t clean anything,” he said. “We clean ourselves here, but how can we stop a virus without disinfectant?”

There is no privacy at that building, no wonder thousands would rather sleep on the streets and trains

Homeless hotels have hundreds of positive COVID-19 cases, but the city wouldn't reveal where they are

NY Post

The city is housing hundreds of homeless people with coronavirus or symptoms of the virus at five Big Apple hotels, sources told The Post.

City officials confirmed that more than 700 spots have been set aside for afflicted homeless people at five undisclosed locations throughout the city, but didn’t say where.

According to the source, however, all five are hotels.

Staffers at two of the locations — a Howard Johnson’s at 235 24th Street in Brooklyn, and Town Place Suites at 38-42 11th Street in Queens — told The Post they were no longer renting rooms to the public because they had been leased out to the city.

A woman answering the phone at the third side, the Radisson at 52 Williams St. in Manhattan, hung up on a reporter.

The telephone was not answered at the two other locations, identified by the source: a Comfort Inn at 548 W. 48th Street in Manhattan and Jamaica Hotel at 183-02 Jamaica Avenue in Queens, which is also identified as a Comfort Inn in some online posts.

There are currently 392 homeless people in isolation at the five sites who either tested positive for the virus or were placed in quarantine “out of an abundance of caution,” the city said.

The city Department of Social Services said 213 homeless people at 93 shelters have tested positive for the virus, with 11 dying from the bug and another 11 leaving after completing quarantine.

Coronavirus stats lag of homeless people sleeping outside and in the subway

THE CITY

Hidden in plain sight between a children’s playground and the stream of traffic into Brooklyn, a homeless encampment sits hard by the Manhattan Bridge.

Three makeshift “bedrooms” allow residents to hunker down for the night under an open sky, just a few feet from one another. There’s no sink or soap to follow the city’s wash-your-hands admonition and no sign of hand sanitizer. A pale blue surgical mask lies in the dirt.

A table in one of the bedrooms includes a paperback copy of “Birth of Tragedy,” by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.

In the time of coronavirus, this encampment lies outside the reach of the frantic effort to contain an illness that had killed more than 770 New York City residents as of Sunday afternoon. And as the virus spreads, it’s touching the ranks of New Yorkers who live outdoors, bedding down on sidewalks and subways.

 

A man camps out in Times Square on March 24, 2020. Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY

Last week, only one unsheltered person had tested positive for COVID-19, the disease caused by coronavirus, according to city officials. By Saturday, there were four — three of whom remain hospitalized.

As for the rest of the estimated 3,200 New Yorkers living on the streets and in subways, keeping tabs on where they are or on who is infected is proving a steep challenge.

The city has stopped tracking down close contacts of those who have COVID-19 as the number of those infected skyrockets, so there is no account of who these four unsheltered individuals had contact with in the days before they tested positive.

Meanwhile, police are breaking up encampments around the boroughs, THE CITY has learned.

“This population is finding it remarkably difficult to do the things they’re being told to do,” said Josh Dean of HumanNYC, a group that presses to house the unsheltered homeless. “The general guidance is to stay at home and wash your hands and unsheltered homeless people can’t do that.”

 

Mayor de Blasio is refusing to release information about what exact areas in the five boroughs have the most COVID-19 cases

Propublica

Residents of Los Angeles can go to a county website to look up how many confirmed coronavirus cases there are in Beverlywood, or Koreatown, or Echo Park. Officials in Charlotte, North Carolina, have released figures at the ZIP code level. The South Korean government is sending geotargeted texts to alert citizens to positive cases near them.

In New York, now at the center of the outbreak, Mayor Bill de Blasio has resisted releasing what the city knows about a basic question: Where, precisely, is the virus?

Answers could take the form of a number of data points — tests, confirmed infections, hospitalizations or deaths — each of which shed light on a different part of the crisis.

Instead New York, along with several other state and county governments around the country, has released daily data only on the county, or borough, level. That means there is just one figure for COVID-19 cases in all of Kings County — Brooklyn — which has a population larger than 15 states. 

The roughly 4,600 confirmed COVID-19 cases among Brooklyn’s 2.6 million residents account for 8% of the confirmed cases in the entire country. There is also just one coronavirus case figure for the 2.2 million residents of Queens, where there are just over 5,000 confirmed cases.

The lack of detailed information makes it difficult for medical workers, journalists and the public to establish whether particular communities in the city are being harder hit and to get beyond anecdotal accounts of which of the city’s roughly 60 hospitals are already overwhelmed.

Dr. Michael Augenbraun, director of the infectious diseases division at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in central Brooklyn, said that while he knows the city has its hands full, the data could be useful for doctors. “Everyone is struggling to make sense of this evolving picture,” he said. “I think it would be useful to us in the hospitals to get a detailed situational appraisal, to know how much of the burden we are confronting.”

Augenbraun noted that more precise data could reveal important trends in how the disease is affecting different New Yorkers. “There are many things that may correlate with the spread of infectious diseases,” he said. “Race might be one, poverty might be another.”

But some of those same factors, particularly ethnicity and race, may account for the city’s reluctance to make public more localized data that could point to clusters in particular neighborhoods, among certain communities. Around the country, there have been disturbing reports of bias attacks against Asian Americans by assailants blaming Chinese communities for the spread of the virus.

“The risk is that certain communities would be unfairly stigmatized, especially if communities with many COVID-19 cases already shoulder poverty or high crime,” said Dr. Jessica Justman, associate professor of medicine in epidemiology at Columbia University. “On the other hand, communication and information are always important and especially important in a pandemic setting.”

Some experts argue that the city should be releasing more granular information, perhaps even down to the block level.

“More detailed information will allow everyone to target their efforts much more effectively than only county-level information,” said John Mollenkopf, director of the Center for Urban Research at the CUNY Graduate Center.
 

In Newark, the largest city in neighboring New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka has disclosed that there were three coronavirus hot spots where residents should take extra precautions. On March 21, the city released detailed maps of the areas, which cover between 50 and 100 square blocks; it did not release the specific number of cases for each area.

New York has held fast on the policy the mayor laid out during a March 12 press conference when he was asked by a reporter if the city could go beyond borough-level numbers and break down cases by neighborhoods. The mayor declined, saying only that the city would release figures in the case of what he called a “cluster.”

“When we say ‘community spread,’ the assumption should be that this is something that is going to reach every corner of the city, whether we like it or not,” he said at the press conference. “And I don’t think it’s particularly productive. I don’t know what you do with that information. I don’t know how you change your life. Unless there is an indication of a cluster, that’s something we absolutely will talk about.”

THE CITY 

The city is sending homeless shelter residents and public hospital patients with coronavirus to hotels — but won’t say where.

And officials aren’t providing hotel staff or the city employees monitoring the infected guests with masks or any other form of protective equipment — instead instructing them to maintain social distance.

“Going into a hotel room with an infected patient is the same as going into a room of a hospital with an infected patient,” said City Councilmember Stephen Levin (D-Brooklyn), who called for protection for the workers.

The news came as officials confirmed the first death of a homeless New Yorker who succumbed to COVID-19.

The city’s Department of Homeless Services and the Health + Hospitals Corporation said the shelter residents and patients sent to the hotels are all experiencing low-level symptoms and do not require intensive medical care.

As of Wednesday, DHS had placed 65 individuals from shelters into hotel rooms.

Among them: residents who are infected, people who came in close contact with those who tested positive and shelter clients with potential coronavirus symptoms who haven’t been tested, officials said.

Overall, the city has lined up 500 rooms in four hotels, though only two facilities were being used as of Wednesday afternoon, officials said.

Isaac McGinn, a DHS spokesperson, declined to reveal the locations of the hotels, citing shelter residents’ privacy.

HHC wouldn’t say how many patients it had sent to the hotels so far. At least one HHC patient with COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, had no known address and was routed to a hotel, via DHS.

 The number of shelter residents infected with the virus jumped from 17 to 39 between Sunday night and Tuesday night, with the illness spreading from 12 to 27 separate shelters across the city during that time, DHS officials said. Twelve people have been hospitalized — including the unidentified person who died Tuesday.

Queens has the most COVID-19 cases in the city with 6,420 and had the biggest gain in the last 3 days at last count on THE CITY's website.

Followed by Brooklyn with 5,232, Manhattan with 3,616, Bronx with 3,532 (second biggest gain) and Staten Island with 1,166. 

A total of 285 citywide have died by the virus. 

I'm going to take a break for a few days.