The official seemed stunned, and police watched anxiously as the meeting broke up. “You dump your garbage on us because you think we’re garbage!” shouted a black woman to a city official. A packed meeting in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, about a proposed shelter for 104 men over the age of fifty that I attended this winter quickly devolved into a cacophony of ire. The 661 buildings in the municipal shelter system are filled to capacity nightly, and Mayor Bill de Blasio recently announced plans to open ninety new sites, many of which are already being ferociously resisted by neighborhood residents. There are at least 61,000 people whose shelter is provided, on any given day, by New York’s Department of Homeless Services. The tide of homelessness is only the most visible symptom. What makes the crisis especially startling is that New York has the most progressive housing laws in the country and a mayor who has made tenants’ rights and affordable housing a central focus of his administration. New York City is in the throes of a humanitarian emergency, a term defined by the Humanitarian Coalition of large international aid organizations as “an event or series of events that represents a critical threat to the health, safety, security or wellbeing of a community or other large group of people.” New York’s is what aid groups would characterize as a “complex emergency”: man-made and shaped by a combination of forces that have led to a large-scale “displacement of populations” from their homes. Eighty percent of its 250 apartments are subsidized units, for which there were 87,754 applications when it opened. At one time these included then- United Nations Secretary General Kofi Annan.A view from 7 DeKalb Avenue, an apartment tower in Downtown Brooklyn. Due to its proximity to the headquarters of the United Nations, Roosevelt Island is home to a large number of diplomatic sector employees. The FDNY also maintains its Special Operations Command facility at 750 Main St. There are attempts to privatize three other buildings, including the cooperative. One rental building (Eastwood) has left New York State’s Mitchell-Lama Housing Program, though current residents are still protected. There is also a cooperative named Rivercross and a condominium building named Riverwalk. Most of the residential buildings on Roosevelt Island are rental buildings. Roosevelt Island is owned by the city but was leased to the New York State Urban Development Corporation for 99 years in 1969. It was renamed Roosevelt Island (after Franklin D. It was known as Welfare Island when it was used principally for hospitals, from 1921 to 1973. The island was called Minnehanonck by the Lenape and Varkens Eylandt (Hog Island) by New Netherlanders, and during the colonial era and later as Blackwell’s Island. Together with Mill Rock, Roosevelt Island constitutes Manhattan’s Census Tract 238, which has a land area of 0.279 sq mi (0.72 km²), and a population of 11,700. Running from the equivalent of East 46th to 85th Streets on Manhattan Island, it is about 2 miles (3.2 km) long, with a maximum width of 800 feet (240 m), and a total area of 147 acres (0.59 km²). It lies between Manhattan Island to its west and the borough of Queens, on Long Island, to its east. Roosevelt Island is a narrow island in New York City‘s East River, within the borough of Manhattan. © FEMA – Kenneth Wilsey □ Listen to this Post
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