Don’t believe what you see with your own eyes
Few people blame the mentally disturbed or emotionally damaged for their tragic homeless circumstances. Yet, the City uses irrelevant simplistic straw man attacks about what people may think concerning the homeless in order to push their shelter-building agenda. Local churches, synagogues and other neighborhood resources have tried to take care of residents in established Queens communities who have fallen on rough times. But it is not the role of politicians and other elites to exacerbate or unload the homeless and related problems on communities that had little to no homeless in the first place. They shift one neighborhood’s issues to another under the guise of promoting some superior pseudo-moralistic agenda. In truth, they just want to pass on problems and blame for failure, shirk responsibility and be praised for doing it.

Most proposed shelters not only do not remove the homeless from the street but dump them onto streets where there were none before. We notice the new disturbed persons in the area. For example, one alcoholic defecates on a park chess table next to the playground. We witness that the number of sleeping homeless on the morning train ride has doubled and new babbling drugged-out faces roam the neighborhood. To boot, the police can do nothing.

The suggestion that shelters have increased property values elsewhere despite any rise in crime – from assault, to burglary, to pushing someone on the subway tracks – would indicate that instead of homeowners, perhaps shelters should pack each neighborhood. Then, we can all live with the highest property values like Park Slope, home to former mayor de Blasio. Incidentally, there are no shelters for the political elite and while their property values are five to ten times that of other New Yorkers, they pay property taxes that are lower than most – taxes that we all pay to put shelters “in someone else’s backyard” – ours.

When a neighborhood helps their own sane and able citizens in times of need to get back on their feet that says something about our society and community. But the homeless that need special hospitalization and housing are not being “sheltered” but rather “dumped” into other communities, not for some romantic notion of caring and empathy but for the purpose of getting them out of another’s “backyard,” out from their jurisdiction, because the city has no valid housing or medical solutions except spreading the homeless around.

David Pambianchi
Middle Village