Mayor used Queensbridge tenants as 'cover' in homeless reshuffling, Van Bramer says
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Councilmember jimmy van bramer. jeff reed/city council photography
By David Brand
Long Island City Councilmember Jimmy Van Bramer says the mayor is exploiting tenants of the Queensbridge Houses to deflect criticism sparked by the city’s ad hoc homeless-hotel reshuffling.
The same day that Mayor Bill de Blasio decided to eject 300 men from a hotel on the Upper West Side in response to rich residents’ complaints, he also said the city would move people out of a hotel in Long Island City to satisfy tenants of the Queensbridge Houses. De Blasio has said the LIC plan shows he is not just listening to the cries of the well connected.
But Van Bramer said that justification doesn’t make sense. The city chose to move 60 to 70 women out of the Long Island City Plaza Hotel, which is further from the Queensbridge Houses than several other hotels housing homeless New Yorkers and unlikely to have generated many complaints.
“He caved to rich, angry white people on the Upper West Side and then used Queensbridge as cover,” Van Bramer said. “It was shameless.”
Since April, the city has rented rooms at several hotels in the area around Queensbridge to house homeless adults and stop the spread of COVID-19 inside barracks-style shelters.
The placement of hundreds of men at the Lucerne Hotel on Manhattan’s West 79th Street fueled intense NIMBY backlash from Upper West Side residents who played up accounts of drug use, menacing and masturbation by shelter-hotel residents. The anti-homeless Upper West Siders generated weeks of negative tabloid coverage and hired attorney Randy Mastro, a former deputy mayor, to sue the city. De Blasio decided to remove the men from the hotel Sept. 8.
The plans to pull people out of the LIC Plaza Hotel and the Lucerne Hotel have both been suspended, the Department of Homeless Services said Monday, but not before initiating a series of pending displacements affecting hundreds of homeless New Yorkers. The Mayor’s Office and DHS did not respond to requests for comment.
Van Bramer said he has not heard complaints about homeless women staying at the Long Island City Plaza Hotel at 40-40 27th St., though some constituents have shared concerns about other hotels housing homeless men much closer to Queensbridge Houses.
De Blasio told reporters Sept. 9 that he heard the complaints from Queensbridge residents when he “was out there a few months ago.”
Van Bramer said de Blasio seemed to reference a brief conversation he had with Queensbridge Houses Residents Association President April Simpson on May 26. Simpson did not respond to phone calls seeking comment.
Longtime Queensbridge resident Ray Normandeau, who runs a news website covering the housing complex, told the Eagle that he, too, was confused by the decision to kick the women out of the LIC Plaza Hotel.
“As far as the mayor, he’s not helping out Queensbridge. Maybe this is to make it seem like they are doing something,” Normandeau said. “The Long Island City Plaza did not concern us.”
Local residents have debated the homeless-hotel issue for several weeks in a Queensbridge tenants’ Facebook group.
Some who cheered the LIC Plaza Hotel decision nevertheless questioned why the city chose to move women from that site if the plan was really in response to tenants’ complaints.
“40-40 27th street? Lets start with 21st street and 40th ave. 12th street and 40th ave. No other community has been impacted in this manner. Why aren't these folks receiving services like mental health and job assistance?” wrote Rosalyn Moore Henderson.
A handful of tenants have said that they want to hire an attorney and amplify their complaints about the men staying in nearby hotels just like the anti-homeless Upper West Siders did.
“No we need file a law suit like the residents of the upper west side, the city has removed the homeless from two hotels in that area,” wrote tenant Susan Boyce.
But others have pushed back. Tenant Shannon Elayne urged her predominantly Black and Latino neighbors not to try to mimic the actions of the mostly white Upper West Siders who protested the shelter hotel residents.
“UWS are your latte-liberals that will vote for the ‘progressive’ candidate but are still racist. Black people should not and must not want to emulate that. These are the BBQ Beckys,” wrote tenant Shannon Elayne.
