By Gus Saltonstall
When last we heard about the new homeless shelter for women scheduled to go into the old Calhoun School building on the Upper West Side, plans called for an opening this fall. But, after a lot of back and forth with the city’s Department of Social Services (DSS) over the past few weeks, the Rag has learned the opening is delayed, and most likely will take place sometime in early 2025.
The Rag also viewed the proposed contract between DSS and Volunteers of America (VOA), the nonprofit that will run the shelter at 160 West 74th Street, between Columbus and Amsterdam avenues.
The contract, which is not yet finalized, calls for DSS to pay VOA $79.6 million for case management, job development, medical and legal services, mental-health help, food, security, and all the other costs that come with running a shelter, over the course of the contract.
While the two sides are still negotiating how that money will be specifically budgeted out, an employee from DSS told the Rag that the $79.6 million figure is not expected to change.
The length of the contract has multiple options. VOA told a Community Board 7 meeting earlier this year that it would run the shelter for nine years. But the proposed contract defines an initial period of four years and eight months, at which point VOA and the city would need to agree on a renewal. But the total period of the contract, with renewal, would run no more than nine years.
The Calhoun School building is owned by Bayrock Capital, a private development company, which purchased the building in the summer of 2023 for $14 million. Bayrock leases the building to VOA as a tenant, but although that lease is on file with the city, it is not accessible.
Bayrock originally said the property would be developed into a residential building.
The DSS employee clarified that the city agency has no contract with Bayrock.
Read More:
- ‘Save The Former Calhoun School Building’ Postcards Arrive in UWS Mailboxes
- Former UWS Calhoun School Building Will Be Women’s Shelter For At Least 9 Years: CB7 Meeting
- City Approves Building-Design Changes to Incoming 74th Street Shelter: What’s Next?
- UWS Community Board Votes in Favor of Building Design Changes for Incoming 146-Bed Shelter: LPC Vote Set for Jan. 9
- UPDATE: 146-Bed Women’s Homeless Shelter Opening Fall of 2024 in Former UWS Private School
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Is this shelter contract part of the FBI investigation of the Adams administration yet?
And when there is a shelter on every street with no change to the amount of homeless and mentally disturbed people living and walking our streets, then maybe some of you will vote for better leadership. One without payoffs, corruption, pie in the sky nonsensical theories and only people with common sense and financial acumen.
I am sure some would run for City Council, Borough President and the Mayoral position if they thought they had a chance. But they won’t, not until this neighborhood and this city finally says enough is enough. Millions and billions spent on the homeless and mentally ill and IT’S ONLY WORSE.
So here we have two giveaways in one. A lease to Bayrock capital which the city will pay for through VOA and then a contract with VOA. At this point wouldn’t it be prudent for the city to start to look for other providers after decades of failures? Yet the same players are given millions again and again. With all the property that the city owns why is it necessary to lease a building like this?
Read about what has happened with the old PS64 on the lower east side for a glimpse of just how corrupt our entire system is:
https://oldps64.com/
Interesting to read this and the current WSR article about the luxury building planned for the Mermaid Inn buildings.
The tenants who lived in those buildings lost their housing at some point….
A reader comment notes the apartments were chiefly rent stabilized (“affordable “) and the landlord held them vacant for about 5 years? Maybe more?
So folks lose their housing – and no one cares.
Then elected officials insist there is need for more development for apartments and need for more shelters……
These apartments would not have been vacant had the landlord been allowed to charge market rents. Rent control always leads to housing shortage. Oh, and there is something wrong when it is more profitable to rent to homeless than to people willing to pay more than $3000 a month for a studio!
These were not apartments. It was a school and before that I believe it was a Phoenix House. So rent controls would not have been a factor.
Thanks for point this out, there is indeed a connection. NYC has not kept up with building housing, since at least the downzoning and implementation of the FAR cap in the 1960s. Turns out when you don’t build enough new housing to keep up with demand, rents and prices go up above inflation and the poorest NYers get displaced. Unfortunately we are reaping what earlier generations sowed… the shelters are just a band-aid but can’t fix the problem.
We have enough available buildable space in NYC to handle 20 million people with the current zoning laws. Maybe the biggest problem with housing is that most young professionals are socially expected to live in the same 20 neighborhoods which includes the UWS and that living with one’s parents or family is considered taboo by our society? Not only that, you want to date other young professionals, no UWSer will be willing date someone in Queens or Nassau or Westchester or NJ. If we minimized the number of young transplants living in areas like the UWS due to social expectations, prices will drop like a rock, actually the COVID real estate market in Manhattan and other gentrified areas like parts of Brooklyn were living proof of that.
80 million to run a homeless shelter for a few years. Someone making out like a bandit.
Could WSR do a complete inventory of how many homeless shelters/ assisted housing the entire UWS has? Including existing ones and future ones. Maybe mark them on a map.
It would be really handy to have the numbers.
VOA of course could have leased a much cheaper or larger building for far less money in other parts of the 5 boroughs but then Bayrock Capital would not get the windfall of ridiculous payments from VOA funded by taxpayers. NY is so corrupt.
If the goal is truly to provide shelter, why choose such a high cost location?
Staten Island does seem like a good choice
Why can’t NYU or Columbia open up a campus on Staten Island? They can use eminent domain to build the perfect urbanist 15 minute city society with ferry access to elsewhere in NYC.
Always makes me wonder who the folks complaining about these contracts and homeless shelters voted for. I can’t imagine it was Lee Zeldin or Curtis Sliwa. We make choices.
Exactly.
Step 1: I really like my private health care plan and my doctor.
Step 2: Votes for person who has repeatedly said she’d end private health care and force us into a lousy government-run system.
Step 3: What do you mean I can no longer choose my own provider? I’m forced into some awful state-run system? I can no longer see my trusted doctor? How did this happen ?!?
LOL
Absolutely NO ONE has suggested you lose private health care. EVER. Stop the falsehoods. Secondly, the cost of health care in America is outrageous and many people cannot afford it. The Affordable Health Care Act is a great thing for people who need it. I have private health care through my employers and always have since I started working fulltime in 1977. I have never lost any ability to have or retain my own doctors even though I went on Medicare as my primary insurer when I turned 65 almost four years ago. When you ask “how did this happen?” It didn’t, and it doesn’t and it won’t. Nothing to “lol” about. It’s simply nonsense.
I beg to differ. In 2008, after I was laid off, I was able to purchase a PPO plan from United Healthcare for $200 per month. Today, that plan costs $1500 per month through an employer, and is unavailable to individuals. Thank you Obamacare. It is now a 4 to 5 month wait for a specialist – dermatologist, etc… Most OB/GYN are not even accepting new patients. Have you looked at the costs of plans on an healthcare exchange? Thousands of dollars per month.
The City is spending all this money to house migrants? Sound weird
Maybe a less expensive solution like a tiny
house village for a fraction of the cost
Exceptional times require creative solutions
and the Tiny House could be a brilliant solution. A track of land should be found
and at 4K a house hundreds could be built
is a short time. It’s possible. It’s a solution
This is a homeless shelter, not a migrant shelter. It is two different things.
Wake up people – there is an election coming up – stop voting for ineffective idealistic career politicians. It’s destroying the city and no one – including the city’s most vulnerable – is being helped. Elect different city council – they have a big say in what happens – or doesn’t – in your neighborhood. We just keep pushing out those of us who pay all taxes for the city’s crappy programs that just line the pockets of shelter “providers”. Eventually there will be a bunch of progressive politicians and homeless left in the city with no one to fund their idealistic programs!
“VOLUNTEERS” of America. For $80 million over ten years.
If that’s not the most oxymoronic situation, I don’t know what is.
It’s up there, for sure. As is the fact that as a City, we spend $60,000 / year per homeless “client.”
Tens and tens of millions of people across (developed) Europe live on less, comfortably in the middle class.
Which is the chicken and which is the egg? There seems to be a belief that shelters house homeless from our neighborhood, residents who were displaced because of luxury development. People who just need a little help so they can get back on track. But is that who gets placed in all these new shelters? Or, is the intent to move in people who can support the need for endless social services providers? This is part of the rinse and repeat cycle. The goal is not to make homeless self sufficient and end homelessness, but to create more govt dependency. If you build it they will; come. There are lots of people who would love to live on UWS but can’t afford it or don’t qualify for govt assistance. People who have the mental and physical capacity and ability to fill local jobs. It often seems that the jobs being created are the non profit social workers employed under these expensive contracts. It’s about their jobs and not the homeless being housed.
Women are being sucker punched in broad daylight a week apart walking their dog and minding their business. Disturbed and or homeless take your pick. Homeless MEN sleeping on the street everywhere on the westside.
Various people daily asking for hand outs. I personally was chased and yelled out for taking a innocent picture of a building (not him West 72 and Broadway). I say more homeless shelters in this area is not going to do much good for the people who do live here and the young families and older residents . Don’t the people who live in these areas have a say? Put the shelter in Mayors Adams neighborhood his Coop in Fort Lee that he owns or the multi unit Bed Stuy area in Brooklyn he claims he lives in and see if that gets pushed through. I doubt it.
We have had enough of these shelters. The neighborhood is dangerous and dirty and devoid of useful stores. Nothing open past 7pm and after dark forget going out. Whatever was wonderful about the UWS is gone. The wandering crazy homeless should be put away before we all get sucker punched. Someone is making buckets of money with these so called shelters. What about Queens or Brooklyn.?? Why in the middle of Manhattan? All about the $$$.
There aren’t useful stores on Amsterdam in the West 70s? In what world do you live?
When all the politicians currently in local office live in Brooklyn and made a fortune on kickbacks from real estate developers, they let UWS become a dump. It started with Deblah and his ex wife who felt the UWS wasn’t diverse or accepting they dumped their homeless shelters and shorting galleries all along the west side and everyone else moved to the burbs and got tax breaks in Brooklyn. When Schumer moved along with his cousin, it was telling. We are lucky those coming to NY still enjoy Manhattan. But take a trip to Brooklyn Heights and Williamsburg and see where all the stores and restaurants went.
Why we have any homeless shelters on the UWS baffles me. Keep UWS safe and clean!
I would rather have a homeless shelter on the UWS than a homeless shelter in eastern Queens or southern Brooklyn because at least the UWS has enough liberals willing to support them and there is decent transportation and access to opportunities. Neighborhoods like Dyker Heights or College Point lack both of those.
Dock retired cruise ships on our empty piers!
What nobody is calling out is that w 74th is part of Central Park Historic District.
Why place homeless shelter which will alter the ambiance and tourist dollars.
Making the building handicap accessible by altering the historic facade while existing entrances below street level can be used instead,
This will also make it more discreet and respectful to our historic neighborhood to have applicants waiting for empty beds with their belongings below street level.
Landmark Preservation District signed off without community input according to the latest West Side Spirit article by Mike Oreskes.