City defends conditions at Queens veterans’ shelter

Queens Councilmembers Julie Won and Phil Wong grilled city officials on conditions at a veteran’s shelter in the borough.  Screenshot via New York City Council/Youtube

By Ryan Schwach

City officials defended the conditions and policies at the embattled Borden Avenue Veterans’ Residence in Long Island City during a highly anticipated hearing before the City Council on Wednesday.

The heads of the city Departments of Social Services and Veterans Services told legislators they plan to address ongoing concerns at the shelter where residents have complained about leaks, low-quality food, a lack of privacy and other safety issues.

During the hearing, elected officials and veterans’ groups doubted whether the city would actually follow up with its promises to fix the issues.

While Erin Dalton, the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, said the agency is working to address some of the key problems at the shelter, he added that residents may not see those fixes for some time.

Dalton said that ongoing roof construction, which has resulted in leaks and unsightly tarps placed on the ceilings over sleeping areas, won’t be completed until December 2029 and is slated to cost $4.3 million.

“Until the full roof replacement is complete, [Department of Homeless Services] is managing leaks in the sleeping area with tarps, which will stay up until further notice,” she said. “Beds in the affected areas will stay offline until the capital work is complete.”

Councilmembers took issue with the timeline, considering the leaky roof has been a known problem for years.

“Those roof leaks did not start a couple months ago, they've been leaking for years,” said Queens Councilmember Phil Wong.

Wong, as well as Councilmembers Julie Won and Frank Morano, have been inside the facility and have heard a litany of complaints from residents.

“For the last five years we have had the same amount of complaints, and even before I was elected, we had the same amount of complaints, and it's extremely disturbing,” Won said.

Another issue is a lack of privacy in the showers at the facility, which do not have doors.

The nonprofit that operates the shelter, the Institute for Community Living, is installing privacy partitions, Dalton said. That work is expected to be completed in six to eight weeks.

“We will continue to follow up with our shelter residents who want to have privacy and decency, so that they can shower with dignity,” Won said. “So, we will wait for the next two months, starting from today, to make sure that finally that they will have privacy to shower.”

The most common complaint among residents of the Borden Avenue shelter is about the quality of the food they are given.

“It's not real food,” resident Vladimir Tereshin, a Russian-born Navy veteran, told the Eagle earlier this month. “There is no protein at all.”

Another resident described the food as “dog kibble.”

City officials said during a hearing this week that they plan to address some of the issues at the Borden Avenue Veterans’ Residence in Long Island City.   Eagle file photo by Ryan Schwach

“We take those concerns seriously,” Dalton said. “ICL switched food vendors in 2022 in response to resident feedback, and in the coming weeks, DHS and ICL are exploring making additional changes in response to resident concerns.”

There is a kitchen on site, but multiple veterans and advocates said it is rented to a cooking class and is not used by the residents of the building. Shelter residents citywide are not allowed to cook for themselves at shelter sites. However, officials said that residents at Borden Avenue are allowed to join the cooking class.

“That kitchen is an opportunity,” Dalton said.

While poor conditions at the Borden Avenue shelter have been known for years, the issues came to the forefront following funding concerns at the site.

Earlier this year, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration pulled the city out of a federal funding program for the shelter, after the Trump administration set a new condition for the funding that would have forced the shelter to stop serving transgender veterans.

The shelter, which also receives city funding, has been propped up by the federal program for two decades.

Mamdani had said the loss of funding would not interrupt services at the shelter, and Dalton reiterated during the hearing that the city was making up for the shortfall.