Few Reassurances from Common Ground
Thursday, August 6th, 2009
An official at the non-profit that plans to operate a scatter-site homeless shelter in the old Oak Hotel on Avenue H and 12th Street said in a letter to the community board that most of its clients would be drawn, broadly, from the neighborhood — but that it can’t promise they won’t be sex offenders among them, and wouldn’t promise to remove people who commit crimes.
Community Board 14 just posted letters from Common Ground outreach director Amie Pospisil and from the Department of Homeless Services, as well as responses from the building’s landlord, in response to local worries that the hotel — once before a seedy SRO — would again grow dangerous.
Common Ground did its best to reassure the building’s neighbors in its letter, but in fact it appears to describe pretty sparse supervision. The only official there most of the time will be the building’s superintendent, whose responsibility is to the building, not the people inside it. The landlord has installed 16 security cameras, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be monitored, though Common Ground brags it has the “ability” to watch them.
Common Ground also says two-person teams will do “rounds” of the building three times a day. The teams are “often…equipped with Master’s level social work staff,” which is a way of saying that at least sometimes, the teams will have no particular training at all. They also decline to promise that clients will lose their apartments if they are arrested for crimes on the site.
The letter offers a series of other non-guarantees, including that it is “not our intention to place anyone here who is a sex offender,” but that they’re “not required” to collect sex offender information, and that it’s up to the sex offenders to register.
The promise that most clients will be local may reassure neighbors, though the letter also suggests that Pospisil’s notion of what neighborhood the building is in is a bit vague: “The majority of the clients are coming from CB14 and surrounding areas of Coney Island.” (The building, in Midwood, is five miles from Coney Island, about the same distance as it is from Downtown Brooklyn.)
In an accompanying letter, the Department of Homeless Services referred most questions to Common Ground. Separately, the landlord, Alain Realty, promised to give the NYPD keys to the building, and said it hadn’t yet rented the other units.
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