Sunset Park deserves a fair share

If you frequent the 25th Street R subway station, you have noticed, especially during the warmer months, a large increase of homeless people sitting on benches in the station and on makeshift chairs on the street nearby. There is no secret why. Fifteen percent of the surrounding population resides in a homeless shelter. That’s more than ten times the citywide average of 1.37 percent, according to the Greenwood Heights Association, a local civic organization.

These staggering numbers are a clear violation of a city mandate, known as Fair Share, which was designed explicitly to prevent such wild imbalances from happening. Now, Mayor Zohran Mamdani has a historic opportunity to right this injustice and begin a new era that meaningfully supports working class communities and homeless neighbors alike.

The growing problem is known to local elected officials. In letters to City Hall last year, Alexa Avilés, 38th District City Council Member, described a “concentration of facilities” in the area, while NY-10 Congressman Dan Goldman described an “inequitable distribution of shelters” that amounted to “an unjustly large concentration of shelters and supportive services that far outstrips the number of similar services located in wealthier neighborhoods.”

And yet the Department of Homeless Services has targeted Sunset Park for even more homeless shelters. A 200-bed men’s shelter is almost complete on 25th Street, between Fourth Avenue and Fifth Avenue, and is waiting for final approval from the mayor’s office. It is located next to a pre-K, and is a mere half a block from yet another shelter for single men. Slated to open in 2028 is another 200-bed single adult homeless shelter in Sunset Park, just “west of the 45th Street R train station.”

The area’s zoning has allowed for the construction of hotels built with the express purpose of obtaining lucrative shelter contracts, according to Avilés. The high concentration of shelters in Sunset Park is the product of an “imbalance in political power, which should never be the determinative factor in resource allocation by our city government,” Goldman wrote.

Put another way, it’s much easier to open a homeless shelter in a working class immigrant neighborhood like Sunset Park than a wealthy, well-connected area filled with lawyers. That’s in flagrant violation of Fair Share, a 1989 city charter revision designed to ensure equitable distribution of city facilities.

It isn’t clear that the city ever planned to honor Fair Share. Even if it did, Sunset Park’s unfair burden grew worse when Covid-19 hit and several area hotels were hastily converted to shelters for the homeless. Next, when waves of immigrants were bussed into New York from red states, even more local hotels were converted into shelters for the many families desperately in need of housing.

Housing is a right in New York and should be. And shelters are a far better option than the homeless encampments that have appeared in many other US cities.

But with an influx of a large homeless population comes the need for social services to support these new neighbors. As Avilés pointed out, this surge of shelters has occurred “without the sufficient wraparound services needed to appropriately serve the City’s unhoused population.” It’s not fair to build these shelters and not include the social services needed to support these neighbors.

As Avilés wrote, “All NYC neighborhoods should share the effort to care for unhoused people. It should not fall to a few neighborhoods like ours.” Fair Share, approved by voter mandate in 1989, was meant to address such injustices. As explained on NYC Comptroller Mark Levine’s official website, the policy was the result of “the City’s disproportionate siting of “undesirable” facilities in low-income communities of color.” The Fair Share framework “is grounded in principles of both fairness and solidarity – it suggests that every community has both a right to a fair share of services (‘getting its fair share’) and a social and moral obligation to help meet our City’s collective needs (‘doing its fair share’).”

The 25th Street shelter was planned and renovated under agreements with Mayor Adams’ administration. Its final approval now rests with Mayor Mamdani. The city has options. This space could be turned into a social services hub for the existing shelter population, or even be turned into actual affordable housing. The latter solution could take the form of a Single Residency Occupancy (SRO) or even permanent homes for families who have been bounced around from shelter to shelter.

Responding to the local outcry, both Avilés and Goldman have come out publicly opposing the 25th Street shelter. Mamdani and Avilés are both members of the Democratic Socialists of America. “The City should be incentivizing the creation of permanent housing, which is what we need, rather than temporary shelter facilities,” Avilés wrote. Will Mamdani listen to his political ally? Or will the same game continue? It’s time to stop disregarding Fair Share, denying the homeless population the services they need, and wasting endless city funds on temporary fixes.