A Lucerne For Every Neighborhood

The A-Train Ripper’s last known address was a homeless hotel. The man who stomped on an Asian woman’s head in Midtown (after being released from prison) was a resident of a homeless hotel. The man who shot three people in Times Square including a four year old child, yet another resident of a homeless hotel. See the pattern yet?

Homeless hotels are a disaster, and NYC progressives want more of them. 

On Thursday May 13th an online forum was held regarding grandiose plans for converting more NYC hotels into homeless shelters. Plans for Adaptive Reuse Together: Hotels to Permanent Affordable Housing was hosted by Midtown South Community Council, Project Renewal, VocalNY, and Manhattan BP Gale Brewer. Described as a once in a generation opportunity to purchase distressed hotels, the speakers explained their bold ideas for what to do with New York’s newly found bailout money, including $100 million already secured by Chuck Schumer for the Housing Our Neighbors with Dignity Act (HONDA).

Paulette Soltani from VocalNY went on to describe the HONDA program and it’s clients who would be inhabiting the newly converted hotels:

“It may be people that are working, it may be people who have kids and families, but we’re also talking about people who are using drugs, people who may have mental health issues, people who may never work, and maybe haven’t worked ever. And we believe that every single one of those people deserves to be housed in quality housing, in permanent housing. So that’s our goal through HONDA, and that’s our goal in all of our work every day.”

Eric Rosenbaum from Project Renewal then picked up where Paulette left off, suggesting the HONDA program also be used to house people suffering from mental illness, and those who have recently been released from prison:

“A lot of people who used to be housed in the psychiatric hospital system have ended up in shelter. And the same thing’s been happening in the criminal justice system. We have been reducing the populations in our jails and prisons for really good reasons, but similarly we haven’t created the community based housing that those people need. So today we have the challenge of buses literally showing up at the gates of prisons and jails, and bringing people directly to the gates of the shelter system.” 

Most of our hotels are located in our densest neighborhoods that would also be fairly described as the center of our city’s economy, and yes you read that correctly: These people want to fill NYC’s hotels with drug addicts, people who just got out of prison, the mentally ill, and people who have never worked.

“How did we allow the hotel industry to take over our city, particularly in midtown to snuff out tenement buildings, imbalance our neighborhoods, and create such a dependency on tourism for the sake of wealth,” sniveled John Mudd, the President of Midtown South Community Council. After all, who wouldn’t want to exchange proud, brightly lit hotels filled with tourists for recidivist ex-cons freshly released from Rikers Island? 

From the historic hand painted murals at Bemelmans to the grandiose views only seen from the lobby at the Beekman Hotel, NYC’s hotels are an undeniable part of our culture, history and economy. And that has to change, obviously. NYC Tourism was too big, too successful, and wasted prime real estate on providing both jobs and money for the city. Progressives prefer we do away with this outdated capitalist model, and would rather we embark on a path of printing money for government nonprofits that hold zero accountability for the societal decline caused in local neighborhoods, while accelerating our city towards a future of endless blight and government dependance. 

Sounds amazing doesn't it? 

No one knows the failure of homeless hotels better than the Upper West Side, home to Project Renewal’s Lucerne Hotel, which would best be described as a disaster that triggered a revolt by the neighborhoods longtime residents. Can hotels be converted into SROs or homeless shelters easier than other buildings? Yes, of course they can, provided they don’t offer sufficient services. But the rollout of this horror story into more neighborhoods will only perpetuate similar outcomes as found on the Upper West Side. 

Four homeless hotels were established during COVID that poured an estimated 700 men suffering from mental illness and drug addiction onto the Upper West Side. Upon their sudden arrival came an instant increase in crime, chaos, and suffering. Local residents claim the neighborhood is now the worst they’ve experienced in 40 years. 

No one is confused about the area’s sudden increase of drug arrests including a bust where twelve were arrested for heroin, as all of this is without question a direct result of the area’s mass influx of addicts. This doesn't take a genius to understand what’s going on here. Speak to any longtime resident of the area and they will tell you themselves: None of this was even imaginable before their new neighbors at the Lucerne moved in.

As expected, the hotel-conversion forum conveniently left out all of the horror stories regarding the Lucerne’s actual impact on the neighborhood, which a quick google search would reveal countless newspaper headlines. Residents of the Lucerne pummelled each other in the streets, dead bodies were found inside the hotel, drug addicts flooded the sidewalks, pedophiles were housed next to playgrounds, and the lawyer who represented a neighborhood org in a court case against the Lucerne even had his home vandalized by YIMBY activists. 

It’s pretty safe to say that this homeless hotel experiment failed -- miserably I might add. At one point things were even bad enough that De Blasio himself tried to shut it down. Which leads me to ask: How can anyone advocating for more of this nightmare be trusted?

Despite these above tragedies, homeless hotels still make boatloads of money in government contracts. According to the court case between Downtown New Yorkers Inc. vs the City Of NY, The Lucerne is still receiving $183,000 per week in government money . Bronx homeless shelter provider Victor Rivera raked in $274M in under five years, using it to purchase multiple homes while abusing women within his shelters. Apparently nonprofits are profitable as hell, and the city has done nothing to mitigate the disasters the broken shelter system inflicts on our neighborhoods. 

Back in October of 2020, Nicole Palame of InformNYC learned that The Doe Fund was setting up a new homeless shelter in the Upper East Side. and after doing some research she quickly learned that they are one of NYC’s best providers of homeless services. 

“The Doe Fund is one of the city’s best shelter providers and is transparent to the public presenting its outcomes, data, and has a graduation program to ensure that the men have opportunity for a better future. When the Doe Fund came to our neighborhood during the pandemic, they gave the community their directors phone number, responded to all concerns, and put protocols in place to ensure that their residents were safe and even bussed them daily to their centers for services, training and treatment.” -Nicole Palame.

After Nicole learned that her new neighborhood was one of our city’s best-in-breed for this job that so many organizations seem to fail, she attempted to organize an event to raise awareness for her new neighbor. Her intention was to champion them for being a shining example in a highly dysfunctional industry, to shine some light on them in efforts to make them our gold standard during a time of undeniable human suffering. 

Nicole reached out to Councilman Ben Kallos, Senator Liz Krueger, and assembly member Rebecca Seawright in hopes they would join her event in raising awareness. She was then shut down by Ben Kallos’s office, stating he did not want to draw unwanted attention to NYC shelters, and would not be supportive of her event. Despite the merits of Nicole's intentions, Ben Kallos viewed drawing attention to well-functioning shelters as problematic, preferring the expansion of dysfunctional shelters -- even within his own neighborhood. 

Why would Ben Kallos prefer not to advocate for a homeless shelter with such a great track record? Who knows, but the answer could be that it pays better not to. NYC’s DHS budget more than doubled to $3.2B under De Blasio’s leadership, and the shelter advocates appear to prioritize stealth and unilateral expansion above all else. 

When contacted by Nicole Palame, Homeless nonprofits like Project Renewal and Help USA declined to meet with local Manhattan communities. These shelters operate with a lack of transparency, kicking their residents out most of the day, often requiring them to travel to other neighborhoods for their “services.” Imagine an addict having to navigate their way downtown on their own, with a million reasons to derail them from making it to their rehabilitation program. Things like drug dealers outside your shelter, liquor stores on the corner, and the general feeling of lawlessness that signals to a certain crowd: You can do whatever you want, no one will stop you.

The more time you spend involved in this conversation, the more it appears to be a battle between the residents of the Upper West Side and far left politicians who clearly carry water for the homeless industrial complex, seeing it as their ticket to power and fortune. The Lucerne is vehemently supported by Maya Wiley, Gale Brewer, Helen Rosenthal, and a host of other progressive politicians, despite the societal decline its new residents brought along with them. I’m starting to wonder, who do these politicians really work for if not the citizens? And why are none of them advocating for the city’s best shelters that seem to perform better at solving the problems of this very real crisis?

Many of our hotels also happen to be located in our most dense tourist neighborhoods. These very same neighborhoods provide a lot of jobs and generate a lot of money for our city, ranging from dishwashers to actors in Broadway plays. Therefore the placement of poorly run homeless hotels actually have the potential to directly hurt the neighborhoods we so desperately need for our city to truly recover. Sure, New York is tough, but stray bullets hitting tourists actually do make people think twice about visiting. Of course this is yet another fact that was conveniently left out by those who stand to make the most money from these lucrative government contracts. 

The expansion of homeless hotels really is a once in a generation opportunity, for that the hosts of this forum were right. It’s an opportunity to expand the Homeless Industrial Complex into NYC’s best neighborhoods, make billions of dollars in government contracts, and pretend the new neighborhoods aren’t suffering from a steep decline in public safety, just like they did with the Lucerne.

As Upton Sinclair famously wrote: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”