Housing homeless in sleazy motels helps nobody

Having a home to come to at the end of a long day and find a degree of comfort, privacy and rest is not exactly enshrined as a fundamental human right, but most people would agree that it is essential to wellbeing and even basic quality of life. 

Yet there are people in Riverdale for whom having a home is not a basic part of life, but an elusive luxury. Those include the 30 or so homeless families whom the city has been putting into the Van Cortlandt Motel on Broadway since September. 

City officials argue they had to place the families into the motel to deal with an influx of homeless people this summer. Before September, the motel housed dozens of homeless men, whom the city promised Community Board 8 to relocate. And so it did – replacing the men with homeless families. 

Critics of the move – of whom there are many – say they feel threatened by homeless people hanging around on the streets around the motel, panhandling, knocking on windows or going onto the porches of private homes. In an more clearly menacing development, some inhabitants of the motel have been linked to crimes in the area. 

“At the beginning of the year, we had a bank robbery pattern, and the bank robber was a single male who was living at the motel,” Capt. Terence O’Toole, the commanding officer of the 50th police precinct, told The Press in late October. 

Dozens of Riverdale residents gathered at the precinct on Oct. 20 to share their grievances about the motel’s inhabitants, the city’s failure to come with an even remotely successful solution to the problem of homelessness, and the apparently dismal living conditions at the motel that seem to make it a hazardous place to stay for the homeless children and their parents whom the city is supposedly trying to help. 

An infant died at the motel in his sleep on Oct. 18, in a room that also housed his mother, father and a 3-year-old child, according to police data cited by Capt. O’Toole. Police were investigating. 

Participants in the Oct. 20 meeting of the Community Board 8 public safety committee at the police precinct called for the city to shut down the motel – which is widely seen as a place of assignations, along with serving as a makeshift homeless shelter – and to find a better way of providing the homeless with livable accommodations, without making neighbors feel like they under siege in their own homes. 

“We want to close the motel down,” Laura Spalter, the head of the community board’s environment and sanitation committee, told the meeting. 

But finding an alternative may not be an easy task. In a city where public services are often accused of being inefficient, unresponsive and poorly managed, agencies within the Department of Homeless Services carry a particularly unflattering reputation. 

The NYPD was dispatching its experts to help the Department of Homeless Services’ police with training and equipment, Capt. O’Toole said. 

“They are a very disorganized department, disorganized agency – let’s put it like that,” he told The Press. 

Homelessness is an enduring problem and alleviating it is an uphill battle. But placing homeless families into a motel where infants lack care and comfort and adults lack the help they need, while at the same time making neighbors worry about their own families’ safety, only perpetuates an endless cycle of suffering.