Homeless Shelters Quietly Sprout Up in The Bronx
By:Tawhid Kabir
The Bronx over the past few years has had an increase of homeless shelters, according to the Department of Housing Services. The city has decided to open many of these shelters here in the Bronx because the Bronx is the poorest borough in New York. Furthermore, out of 62 districts in New York, The Bronx has the poorest district.
These shelters are opened throughout the Bronx without consultation with the communities, local activists say. They argue that this creates conflict in neighborhoods. The area that the shelter is placed in is more worried about the effects of the shelter then the need for people's shelters.
Another shelter has just opened in the South Bronx. The shelter will provide housing and facilities for 200 men. Each room will have up to eight men, and the rooms are small. Activists contend that the shelter will affect the community because it will be opened next to a junior high school. These actions, they argue, will create unstable problems in the community. The schools and the surroundings of the area were not taken into account and the community has started to fight back against the introduction of more shelters. Even worse, they say, the shelter will be a transitional shelter, which means the men will be going out and new men will come in and take their place.
The most recent construction of a new shelter, located on Clay Street, has outraged local residents. The effects of this decision were unknown until Agnis Jhonson, an advocate from Highbridge, informed people about what has happened in their community. She shows a horrifying picture of students gathering to take pictures of a man who has used a tree as a urinal. The man was from a homeless shelter that was placed right next to a middle school in Highbridge.
The city needs an affordable place to keep the homeless and the building next to the school was the cheapest and fastest place they could find, said the local district's officials. The contract for Highbridge's homeless shelter is a 15-year contract, but with enough people protesting, residents believe they can undo it. "If a deal can be done a deal can be undone," says Jhonson.
During the day, the people in the shelters are required to seek employment and are let out into the community. This makes the community uneasy and terrified about what could happen to them. The community has already been put in a surprising situation and now has to deal with the men that come from the shelter. Wilfredo Pagan, president of the District 12 Council, says the shelters are described not closely monitored. Pagan himself says he had lived in a homeless shelter when he was a teenager. He says he knows how the shelter system works. Pagan talks about how an organized shelter would create less chaos.
Pagan is scared that the kids will be exposed to too much and wants to protect the community from the problems that the shelter might cause. "This is about the community coming together not to oppose the shelter but to oppose the location," says Pagan. "We don't have anything against the people coming into the shelter."
