Title: NYC’s New Approach to Homeless Shelters: Will It Work? [MUSIC - NYC NOW Theme song]

Janae Pierre: From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. There's a new homeless shelter in Queens offering what city leaders call a healing atmosphere. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is pushing to quickly open even more shelters for New Yorkers in need. On today's episode, we explore how Mamdani is handling the city's growing homelessness crisis alongside an extremely large budget gap, plus one of New York City's longest-running April Fools' pranks.

Before we get into all of that, here's what's happening in our region. The New York State budget is late once again. It was due on April 1st. Governor Kathy Hochul and lawmakers haven't even started discussing the dollars and cents of it all. They've been stuck in a stalemate on a series of policy issues, including the governor's push to scale back the state climate law, which she wants in a final budget deal. Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins says that's what's holding things up.

Andrea Stewart-Cousins: Anytime there's a significant amount of policy in the budget, things do seem to take longer. We really haven't started on the real money part of the budget yet.

Janae Pierre: Lawmakers passed a one-week extender to make sure state employees get paid. Mayor Mamdani says city agencies are now allowed to post on TikTok again. Under former Mayor Eric Adams, New York City joined other cities across the country three years ago in banning TikTok from phones over security concerns about the Chinese social media site. TikTok has since formed a new joint venture to run the app in the US in a move to avoid a wider ban. Agencies in New York City still must follow a set of security rules when posting, like dedicating separate devices just for TikTok. Mamdani has been a prolific social media poster as both a candidate and as mayor. His rise to political stardom was aided by social media videos that went viral online.

The annual Coney Island Mermaid Parade will return this year after an urgent financial crisis threatened its cancellation. Coney Island USA created a GoFundMe page last month asking for money to help save the Mermaid Parade. They say a lobbying push against a proposed beachside casino and years of slow post-COVID revenues had sunk them into a financial crisis. Leaders of Coney Island USA say they've since received over $35,000 in donations. The group isn't disclosing the total operating costs of the parade, but they say the money nearly covers it. The event is set for June 20th.

Still ahead, city officials are working to move out of old, dilapidated shelter buildings and build nicer facilities that are designed to better meet the needs of homeless people. A new shelter recently opened in Flushing, Queens. More on that after the break.

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Janae Pierre: Welcome back. A new homeless shelter just opened in Flushing, Queens. It's built especially for families with children, with brand-new appliances and a playroom, and families will eventually be able to bring their pets. Mayor Zohran Mamdani says this is what homeless shelters should look like in New York City. Many of the city's shelters, where more than 85,000 New Yorkers sleep every night, don't look like this one. Some are falling apart or are in conditions that make thousands of other homeless New Yorkers prefer to sleep on the street.

It's a crisis that has spanned decades. Mayor Mamdani is pushing to more quickly open new shelters. He also sped up a plan to shut down a massive men's shelter in Midtown that was in some pretty bad shape. At the same time, he backtracked on a promise to stop clearing homeless encampments from public spaces. What does all of that add up to? How will Mayor Mamdani handle the city's growing homelessness crisis while the city faces a yawning budget gap? Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty for Gothamist and WNYC. She's been on the ground for all of this. Hey, Karen.

Karen Yi: Hey, Janae.

Janae Pierre: You were at the opening of the Magnolia Gardens Shelter in Flushing. Can you take us there and describe that shelter for us?

Karen Yi: Yes, I went there for the ribbon-cutting. This shelter is in Flushing. There's an Asian community there, and I think what struck me from the beginning was how culturally sensitive this place was. For the opening, they had a dragon dance there.

Janae Pierre: Nice.

Karen Yi: It was really lively. What I'm told is that this building was designed with feng shui elements. When you walk in, there's a nice fountain. You can hear the water falling on the rocks. It's a nice, relaxing sound. There's 90 units here. They're apartment-style with kitchens. It's really designed, purpose-built, is what I'm told. That means that the nonprofit providers really designed this space with families, with children in mind. It is meant for them. Overwhelmingly, what I heard from everyone is they really want this to be a place of healing.

Janae Pierre: Very intentional. Why is it important for this shelter to have this healing atmosphere?

Karen Yi: What they were telling me is that in homeless shelters, I think people are coming from all sorts of situations, especially when you have kids. You might be fleeing an unsafe building. You might have maybe recently been evicted. You might be dealing with a domestic violence situation. They want to make sure that parents, when they come in with their kids, can be set up for success. Commissioner Erin Dalton said it's just a much easier environment to start to rebuild.

Commissioner Erin Dalton: It's just a much easier environment to start to rebuild, to get services and supports, to feel part of the community, and not feel like you're separate.

Karen Yi: A huge part of that will be allowing this building to eventually allow pets. Families soon, once they get their permits, will be able to bring in their pets. Pets are part of the family.

Janae Pierre: For sure.

Karen Yi: I spoke to Deputy Mayor Helen Arteaga, and she says that this represents a new way of thinking of how shelters can be more inclusive, more holistic, more healing.

Deputy Mayor Helen Arteaga: This is a new way of thinking of how shelters should be more inclusive, more holistic, even with pets. I think that's something so unique because sometimes children have their cats, their hamsters, and they don't want to leave them behind, especially when they're feeling so insecure in life. It gives them that sense of security, and sometimes that's all you need.

Janae Pierre: Inclusivity, holistic, these are words that you don't really hear when talking about homeless shelters. What is Mayor Mamdani actually trying to build here, and how different is it from the system it's replacing?

Karen Yi: The plans for this particular shelter in Flushing did predate him. He seems to be embracing this direction. It's really this idea of moving away from the old, dilapidated, institutional feel of shelters that are very often run by private landlords and moving into newer, "purpose-built," this word that I used earlier, facilities that are owned by nonprofits, that are owned by the people that are actually providing the homeless services so that they're designed to better meet the needs of homeless people. Mamdani, when he was on the campaign trail, he didn't really talk about homelessness or homeless shelter or homeless policy while he campaigned.

It's not really something that most mayoral candidates really prioritize. I'll say when he came into office, he very quickly sped up opening non-traditional shelters. These are called safe havens, and these shelters have no curfews, so they're a little bit more flexible. By opening these 300 beds, he was very quickly able to convince a lot more street homeless New Yorkers to come indoors, especially during that brutal cold stretch, if you remember. These safe havens have worked to get more people off the street. Andrew Chappotin took one of these safe haven beds, and this is how he says they differ from traditional shelters.

Andrew Chappotin: I'm in a safe haven. I have my own room. I was not offered a safe haven with my own room the entire time prior to this one. The staff has been very, very kind and also the staff has been informing me of everything that is available for me.

Karen Yi: The Mamdani administration has also pledged to open new shelters. I know of two single men's shelters coming this year. These are projects that he said had stalled under former Mayor Eric Adams and that will open this year.

Janae Pierre: At the same time this new Queens shelter was opening, the city had just closed Bellevue, the men's shelter in Midtown. You were there the morning that the men were bused out. Tell me what you saw there.

Karen Yi: I went to Bellevue the day after the Mamdani administration announced its closure. When I got there, there was this big yellow school bus and maybe about a dozen men that were walking out carrying their belongings either in suitcases or large plastic bags. They were telling me that they were going to get transferred to a shelter in Brooklyn. Most, when I was telling them about the closure, they said they had only recently heard. Steven Roman, he's 31 years old, and he was surprised to hear it.

Steven Roman: I did not know they were closing the shelter now. Actually surprising, when I heard it. I was like, "Oh, wow, now that I need the help," it's like, "Wow, they're closing it down."

Karen Yi: Now, Bellevue, this is an old facility. It was built in 1931. It once housed Bellevue Hospital's psychiatric ward, and it was converted into housing for single men in the 1980s. It's a massive, massive square footage. It's 400,000 square feet. At its peak, it could fit 850 beds. When it was closed, there was only about 250 people there because so many parts of the building were just in disrepair that they actually had to close off sections of the building because of the deteriorating conditions.

Janae Pierre: Oh, wow.

Karen Yi: Previous administrations have tried to close this facility down. There was a story in The Times about how former Mayor Bloomberg wanted to close this facility down, but he got a lot of pushback because he wanted to turn it into a luxury hotel at the time. Advocates all agree people shouldn't be staying in these bad conditions. There's a long history here of fire safety violations, building code issues, but also violence. The city said that it was time to close the building just because of its state of disrepair.

Janae Pierre: Time to close the building, but 250 people, where did these men actually go?

Karen Yi: I was told that the men relocated to a Brooklyn shelter. The city announced this in March, and by mid-March, all 250 men had been moved. The Bellevue shelter, just to be clear, serves multiple purposes. It is what they call an assessment shelter. Anyone who is a single man in New York City who needs a shelter bed for the night goes to Bellevue. That is the front door of where you go to access the shelter system. Then you get placed in a bed within Bellevue while the city figures out a more long-term placement for you.

You could stay there, usually an average of three weeks, but I know other people who have stayed there much longer than three weeks. A lot of these men weren't going to stay there forever. It was just while they found somewhere else. They're going to be relocated to Brooklyn, or they were relocated to Brooklyn, and from there they'll go to a more permanent placement.

Janae Pierre: The Brooklyn shelter serves the same purpose as Bellevue as far as assessing these men?

Karen Yi: No. The intake services, there's two things that were relocated from Bellevue. One is the actual shelter beds. That's the assessment beds. Those were moved to Brooklyn, and the second thing that will be relocated by May 1st is intake. This is the front door that we're talking about, where you go to ask for a shelter bed in the city. Starting May 1st, single men will now go to another address in Manhattan, 8 East 3rd Street.

That's an existing men's shelter, but that's going to be the front door. Then, adult families, these are families without any dependent children, they're now going to go to 333 Bowery. That's also an existing men's shelter, and that will handle intake for adult families. Intake is being splintered off into two different locations within Manhattan.

Janae Pierre: I'm wondering, Karen, is it possible that Mayor Mamdani might have jumped the gun here and closed Bellevue too soon? It sounds like there aren't a ton of alternatives for these men.

Karen Yi: I think advocates all agree that this wasn't a place that was offering the kinds of conditions they would want anyone to live in. I think Mamdani did speed up the closure here. I think many former mayors have tried to close the space, and he came in and did it. What I will be looking out for to help answer that question is what these new intake facilities will be, because that is going to be key for the city, and whether they have properly communicated that to homeless residents, to homeless advocates, that there's now two new intake facilities where people can go to ask for a bed, and making sure that those facilities are actually properly equipped to take down people's information to have these assessment beds while they find more permanent placements within the shelter system.

What that transition will look like come May 1st, that's going to be really pivotal, and I think will help answer: Was this process adequately done? Do people feel informed, and are they aware of the new intake facilities? I spoke to Dave Giffen. He runs the Coalition for the Homeless. His concern is also what's going to happen to this massive real estate, this massive piece of property that was entirely for serving the homeless population. The city has told me they're going to redevelop the space, but he wants guarantees that some part of it will still be dedicated and returned to homeless services.

Janae Pierre: Let's switch gears for a moment. Mamdani ran on ending homeless encampment sweeps, and he said they didn't work. When he took office, though, he paused them, and then in February, he brought them back, a little confusing, but where does he stand on them today, and what does that tell us about his broader plan for homelessness in New York City?

Karen Yi: That's right. When he was campaigning, he promised to end these so-called sweeps. These are controversial. Under Mayor Adams, he really made that a big part of his administration. He made the NYPD in charge. There was this interagency task force, and he said, "NYPD, you're going to decide when and where we do these sweeps." Mamdani said, "I'm going to do away with that." I think very quickly upon taking office, he was getting a lot of pressure from some City Council members and business leaders saying, "What are you going to do about the street encampments?"

I think he caved in, and he figured out a compromise between appeasing the business community and City Council members, who are getting calls from their constituents. There's someone down the block from my work or a business, and there's maybe concerns about public safety or concerns about litter on the street. Council members are telling the administration these complaints and elevating that. What Mayor Mamdani has done when he announced that sweeps were returning, he overhauled the way they're done. No longer will the NYPD be in charge of saying where and when sweeps will happen.

Now that responsibility falls to the Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Homeless Services, because they do street outreach as well, they'll be able to see, "Oh, okay, this is a site that has been around for X amount of years or is relatively new. This is somewhere where we feel like we've been making progress toward helping or convincing people to take shelter or take some of these new low-barrier safe-haven sites." They'll be able to make decisions also based on 311 calls and complaints, but take into account a little bit more of that context and history.

The other thing the mayor is doing differently is when a site is going to get swept, the city workers will come in and put up signs saying, "You have seven days to vacate the area." They're called notices. What Mamdani has said is every day of these seven days, there will be daily outreach. Workers will be going every day. Ideally, the way that the sweeps are supposed to work is by the seventh day, you've convinced everyone that's staying in this encampment to come inside, to take shelter.

By the time the day of the sweep happens, you only really have sanitation coming in and actually doing a cleanup, not actually displacing anybody, because one of the concerns and the pushback from homeless advocates and even people who have experienced the sweeps themselves is that it can be traumatizing. People are getting kicked out. They don't have nowhere to go. They're losing a lot of their belongings. It's getting trashed. They're just seeing what is essentially their home getting put into a big sanitation truck. That is something that the Department of Homeless Services and the Mamdani administration really say they want to prevent.

Janae Pierre: Going back to the discussion earlier about the healing atmosphere and just the human side of this, when you're taking someone's stuff, and you're putting it in the trash, that's completely opposite from the approach that they're taking at the shelter in Flushing.

Karen Yi: Right. There was a protest recently outside of City Hall from formerly homeless New Yorkers who told me this really puts a bad taste in people's mouths, where they don't really want anything to do with city outreach workers or the shelter system because of what you're doing to their belongings. I spoke to Marcus Moore. He was formerly homeless, and he said a lot of things that get tossed sometimes can be your ID card. That can actually set you back in terms of being able to get some sort of housing or help, or even shelter.

Marcus Moore: We've seen medical birth certificates, marriage licenses, and all this here being destroyed and just taken out. In New York City, you need those documents. You cannot move in New York City without those documents.

Janae Pierre: Karen, after everything that you've reported, what's next here?

Karen Yi: I'm going to be keeping an eye on how the city handles the relocation of the intake center for men and adult families. It's the entry point, and that's going to be huge for people knowing where they are and seeing whether these intake services have been properly resourced in the new locations. The other thing is we've been talking about people entering the system, but a big thing is to think about how people exit the system, because you can't just have this ballooning system that's now at 85,000. Something my colleague David Brand has reported on is what the city is doing with expanding these municipally funded housing vouchers called CityFHEPS.

Mayor Mamdani has taken a page from Mayor Eric Adams and is really fighting to expand this program. This program would actually give more people vouchers and help them exit the shelter system. Something that I'm going to be looking at is both how this administration improves the conditions for people in the shelter, but also how it continues to accelerate people being able to leave the system and enter more permanent housing.

Janae Pierre: A phase-out, if you will. For sure. Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty for Gothamist and WNYC. Karen, thanks so much for your work.

Karen Yi: Thanks, Janae.

Janae Pierre: April Fools' Day is here. In New York, there's a long history of pranks that have fooled not just the public, but the media too, from fake events to invented people. Some of these stories have taken on a life of their own. WNYC reporter Samantha Max usually covers public safety, but she's been reporting on some of the city's most memorable pranks. This is certainly different for you, Sam.

Samantha Max: Yes, just trying to give the people what they want.

[laughter]

Janae Pierre: All right. Let's start with Joey Skaggs. Who is this guy, and what is he known for?

Samantha Max: Joey Skaggs, he is an artist and an activist who was born and raised here in New York. He told me that he started as this very serious artist, but he was not getting the recognition that he wanted back in his early days.

Janae Pierre: What's a serious artist?

Samantha Max: What you see in a museum, in a gallery, prestige, whatever your parameter may be, basically, he decided that he was going to do something different, and he instead turned to satire.

Joey Skaggs: I'm going to do what I want to do, say what I want to say in the way in which I want to say it, and not be curtailed by the system. I took to the streets.

Samantha Max: He's been putting together this oral history series documenting the course of his life and his art. As he told me in an interview, he turned the streets into his theater, essentially. He started doing all these different stunts that were making some sort of political message. One of his first stunts was a political statement about the Vietnam War.

Janae Pierre: How did that go over?

Samantha Max: He did it on Easter Sunday, and it was definitely pretty controversial.

Janae Pierre: I'm sure.

Samantha Max: It made headlines and introduced him to the world of media. Suddenly, he was like, "Whoa, when I do something crazy, people will pay attention." He started doing these more and more provocative political things and getting all this attention, like a life-sized Vietnamese nativity scene in Central Park, where he had an army of actors attack with fake guns, a 50-foot brassiere that he installed on Wall Street. He made these condos for fish. It was fish tanks outfitted basically like a dollhouse, which was supposed to be a statement on the cost of real estate and pollution of the oceans. Vitamins made out of cockroaches that could-

Janae Pierre: Gross.

Samantha Max: -cure acne and anemia. Not real. These schemes kept picking up attention in the media. Here's Skaggs again, in this oral history project.

Joey Skaggs: I realized that what I was doing was breaking new ground, using the media as a medium, like a painter would use a canvas.

Samantha Max: Decades later, the media keeps falling for his schemes.

Janae Pierre: Wow, and the schemes that you just listed, they aren't just happening on April Fools' Day?

Samantha Max: No, they're happening at different points of the year, but April Fools' Day is definitely one of his major events of the year, you could say.

Janae Pierre: What do those usually promise, and what actually happens when people show up, and there's no parade?

Samantha Max: Every year has a different theme. This year, it's about what's real and what's not. The press release that he sent out is advertising a parade led by the president himself, followed by a screening of Melania, the "mockumentary," as he calls it, and a reading of all of the redacted names in the Jeffrey Epstein files, minus the victims.

Janae Pierre: I know a lot of people would show up for that. [laughs]

Samantha Max: Last year was the 40th anniversary of the parade. People were invited to wear masks of Eric Adams and Luigi Mangione. Other years, he's advertised a QAnon marching band, a public book burning, a mobile guillotine to behead democracy, on and on and on.

Janae Pierre: This is insane that this has been going on for 40 years. What does that say about Skaggs's following?

Samantha Max: He told me that many years people show up. I should say, sometimes there is some sort of actual event that happens. It's just not at the scale that is being advertised. He knows how to work the media, but I'm curious how people are pulling off pranks in this day and age. We'll see.

Janae Pierre: Miss me with all the jokes. I think everything's a scam in the first place.

Samantha Max: That's probably a good way to look at things.

[laughter]

Janae Pierre: That's WNYC Samantha Max, who usually covers public safety, but today we're talking April Fools' pranks. Thanks a lot, Sam.

Samantha Max: Thanks, Janae.

Janae Pierre: Thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Janae Pierre. See you next time.

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