“A Shelter Can Tip the Scales Sometimes”: Disinvestment,Gentrification,and the Neighborhood Politics of Homelessness in 1980s New York City

Introduction

URGENT. STOP DERELICT ASSESSMENT CENTER AT WEST 88 STREET. THIS WILL DESTROY RESIDENTIAL NEIGHBORHOOD. COMMUNITY BOARD 7 VOTES TONIGHT.

On June 2, 1981, New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch received a wave of identical telegrams. Each urged him to reconsider the city’s plan to open a “derelict assessment center” for homeless New Yorkers at the corner of West 88th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. One telegram writer elaborated further on the damage the facility would inflict on the community, noting, “125 DERELICTS A DAY WILL CERTAINLY CAUSE MENTAL DISTRESS AND PERHAPS BODILY HARM TO THE YOUNGSTERS WHO LIVE HERE.” ¹ Similar protestations arose in Harlem and in East New York, Brooklyn, where residents organized against the opening of municipal men’s shelters in former public school buildings. “GET RID OF THE BUMS,” proclaimed a sign held by one Harlem demonstrator. “WE WANT OUR COMMUNITY SAFE, CLEAN, AND FREE OF DISEASES FOUR (sic) OUR RAISING CHILDREN!!!!!” ² On the Upper West Side, residents successfully blocked the construction of the Derelict Assessment Center; but in Harlem and East New York, the shelters for hundreds of homeless men remained. The sentiments and tactics of citizens in the Upper West Side, Harlem, and East New York were remarkably similar, but the differing outcomes of their protests reveal the divergent fates of these neighborhoods in the midst of the rising neoliberal economic and social order of 1980s New York City.

To many New Yorkers, the rising homeless population encapsulated the problems that plagued their city. As visible figures in the public spaces of New York, homeless people appeared to be both the cause and consequence of rising urban disorder. ³ While most New Yorkers expressed sympathy for the homeless and urged the municipal government to provide aid and shelter to unhoused individuals, many of them also resisted efforts to site shelters and service facilities in their neighborhoods. As the words of neighborhood protesters demonstrate, many New Yorkers understood the people they called derelicts, bums, or, increasingly, “the homeless,” as an undesirable group. This was particularly true of homeless men, whom many understood to pose a safety threat to women and children. Despite the similarity of protesters’ rhetoric, however, their concerns were met with markedly different responses by the New York City municipal government. Even as community activism defeated the Derelict Assessment Center on the Upper West Side, Mayor Koch chastised neighboring Harlem for its “selfishness” in refusing to host a homeless shelter for several hundred men. Even as New Yorkers from a range of neighborhoods decried the urban disorder that they associated with the homeless, disparities in the racial composition, socioeconomic status, and political power of different neighborhoods greatly affected the landscape of shelter and service provision in New York City.

The year 1981 marked the beginning of a turbulent time in the provision of shelter and services to unhoused people in New York City. The number of New Yorkers who lacked a permanent place to live was rising: in 1979, the city estimated that it served 9,000 men and 6,000 women per year; by November of 1983, municipal shelters provided beds to almost 15,000 men, women, and children per month. ⁴ Homelessness had, by many accounts, reached crisis proportions. ⁵ Yet how to assist this growing population—and where to do so—was the source of growing controversy. The Koch administration sought to use city armories and shuttered public schools and hospitals to provide temporary shelter to a population whose numbers—Koch presumed—would soon diminish. But few New Yorkers wanted to take on a large public shelter, even temporarily: in 1981, every local community board rejected the city’s efforts to place a 200- to 300-bed men’s facility in its area of jurisdiction, and local residents protested the city’s plans on the streets and in the courts. ⁶ In 1982, a frustrated Koch proclaimed that an “outbreak of selfishness” had taken hold among city residents. Citing the protests that had occurred in the last year over city projects including the opening of a men’s shelter in Harlem, Koch chastised, “Communities raise their hands not to volunteer, but to point somewhere else. Build it over there . . . not here.” ⁷ The New York Times concurred, noting that if New Yorkers seemed in agreement about one thing, it was the sentiment, “Keep them out of my neighborhood” ⁸

Scholars and journalists have traced a transition in public sentiment about homelessness from one of sympathy in the early 1980s to disgust and frustration by the late 1980s and early 1990s. Kenneth Kusmer, for instance, remarked that the earliest years of New York City’s homeless crisis were a time of “widespread empathy” for unhoused people. By the late 1980s, according to this narrative, shock and despair had largely transformed into “sympathy fatigue,” as New Yorkers became increasingly intolerant of visibly unhoused people in the streets, parks, and public transit terminals of the city. ⁹ In their 2010 review of recent scholarship on homelessness, Barrett A. Lee, Kimberly A. Tyler, and James D. Wright noted several studies that found that the tone of media coverage on homelessness changed in the late 1980s from “positive” to “somewhat harsher,” with “more stories on the deviance of homeless persons, the disorder they create, and the steps being taken to deal with them.” ¹⁰ This shift in public opinion and media representation is especially important in light of the corresponding political shift: after decades of Democratic leadership, Republican Rudolph Giuliani was elected Mayor of New York City in 1993 on a “quality of life” platform to curb (among other things) panhandling, sidewalk vending, and public sleeping—all hallmarks of “homeless” behavior in New York City. ¹¹

Early 1980s struggles against the siting of homeless shelters and facilities, however, defy this conventional dichotomy between the early homeless crisis and its later years. Even as New Yorkers called upon the city to help the homeless, they also protested the presence of homeless people and the facilities that served them. Their complaints centered upon the embodied qualities that homeless people laid bare in the city’s public spaces, including begging, sleeping, and urinating. These protestations reveal ambivalent sentiments toward the homeless: most often, sympathy was tinged with frustration, fear, or disgust, even in the earliest years of the crisis. As Greenwich Village resident Ruth Rosenberg wrote about her encounters with homeless street people in 1981, “my own revulsion [is] followed by feelings of pity and compassion.” ¹² Frustration with visibly homeless people and strategies to minimize their presence existed side by side with sympathy: both were a part of the fabric of the homeless crisis since its earliest years.

However, protests revealed more than just the sympathy and disgust of New York City residents toward visibly homeless people. Neighborhood opposition to homeless facilities was often rooted in a deeper frustration toward a city that had, for years or even decades, concentrated “undesirable” services in neighborhoods that already suffered the worst effects of municipal disinvestment. Indeed, struggles against homeless facilities took place in an urban environment that had been the site of pitched battles against municipal disinvestment and for greater community control of neighborhood institutions. ¹³ For instance, Upper West Side residents had long decried the municipal and state governments’ use of the neighborhood’s single room occupancy (SRO) apartments to house poor and deinstitutionalized people without providing adequate social services for those populations. In East New York, Brooklyn, a predominantly poor African American neighborhood that suffered severe housing abandonment in the 1970s, the city installed several large congregate shelters without community input and failed to provide adequate staffing for the shelter or social services in the area surrounding it. In fact, the city placed the vast majority of homeless shelters and service facilities in majority poor, nonwhite neighborhoods in the 1980s. ¹⁴ As Joel Blau and Alex S. Vitale have separately noted, many communities were justifiably frustrated with the municipal government’s haphazard and inequitable shelter policies. Vitale argues that even liberal African American East New Yorkers eventually embraced “quality of life” politics because the city had for so long failed to address the problems that had grown worse in their neighborhood. ¹⁵ In East New York, Harlem, and the Upper West Side, community members feared that a homeless facility was simply another sign of the city’s lack of investment in their neighborhood. As one West Sider implored the mayor in 1981, “stop using the West Side as a dumping ground.” ¹⁶ These words imply that while homelessness was a new phenomenon, the practice of siting undesirable facilities in underprivileged neighborhoods was not.

Historians of homelessness have thus far tended to focus their studies on the first half of the twentieth century and have not yet closely examined not-in-my-back-yard (NIMBY) struggles or the New York City homeless crisis, more broadly. ¹⁷ Social scientists have frequently examined the causes of NIMBY struggles, both in general and as they relate to the homeless in particular. ¹⁸ A recent article by John C. Kilburn, Stephen E. Costanza, Kelly Frailing, and Stephanie Diaz on NIMBY battles in “decaying communities” provides especially pertinent insight on the attitudes of long-term neighborhood residents toward social service facilities and their clients. ¹⁹ Kim Hopper has hypothesized that NIMBY opposition “may have nothing to do with the specificities of proposed programs or housing, and everything to do with entrenched patterns of eroding local control,” and Jennifer Wolch and Michael Dear similarly noted that homeless shelter opposition was related to the economic inequality and geographical segregation that characterized many late-twentieth-century U.S. cities. ²⁰ With the exception of Hopper, few of these authors have examined change over time as it relates to homelessness, and many who have written about intolerance of homeless people attribute it to the aforementioned “sympathy fatigue.” Examining NIMBY battles from the early 1980s demonstrates that many of the same complex sentiments existed then. Far from being the result of sympathy fatigue in the 1990s or the election of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani in 1993, these attitudes originated in the early 1980s (or earlier) and were embodied in neighborhood NIMBY struggles. By examining the conflicts over homeless shelters and service facilities in the Upper West Side, Harlem, and East New York, this complex history becomes visible.

In some ways, these three neighborhoods were similar: they all had sizable poor and working-class nonwhite populations; they all had a high concentration of old, low-income housing stock; and they had all suffered from some degree of municipal neglect and commercial disinvestment dating back a decade or longer. But crucial differences existed between the three neighborhoods. Unlike Harlem and East New York, which were predominantly low-income and black, Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood was gentrifying. It had a sizable—and growing—population of white residents, and its median income level was well above that of neighboring Harlem. Developers were buying and renovating SRO apartments and other low-cost residential properties. New higher end businesses were opening. ²¹ On the Upper West Side in particular, the New York Police Department was putting more effort into policing the types of petty crime and misdemeanors—including street corner drug dealing and public drinking—that would, by 1993, come to be defined as “quality of life” issues by future mayor Rudolph Giuliani. ²²

Disparities in wealth, geography, and political power affected the outcome of NIMBY struggles over homelessness. As Ella Howard has noted, most of the city’s visibly homeless population was concentrated in Manhattan’s Bowery until the 1970s, when the neighborhood began to undergo gentrification. ²³ Due to dispersal on the Bowery as well as local housing change, the Upper West Side had a sizable population of visibly homeless individuals by the 1970s; in contrast, Harlem and East New York had little, if any, visible homelessness. But in terms of wealth and housing prices, the Upper West Side far exceeded its neighbor, Harlem: by 1985, the Upper West Side’s median income was US$23,006, whereas in Harlem it was US$7,071. Rental housing in Harlem was far less expensive than on the Upper West Side, and Harlem residents were far more likely to live near abandoned or dilapidated buildings than were Upper West Side residents. A similar situation developed in East New York, which was demographically like Harlem. By the mid-1980s, shelters for several hundred men had opened in Harlem and East New York, while Upper West Side residents succeeded in halting the city’s plans to locate a facility for homeless men in their neighborhood. While activists in each neighborhood understood their struggles against homeless facilities as necessary self-advocacy in the face of injustice, the disparate results of anti-homeless service protests demonstrate the diverging courses of the Upper West Side, on one hand, and Harlem and East New York, on the other, in a changing city. ²⁴

The Upper West Side

The historical complexities undergirding struggles against homeless facilities are most vividly illustrated in the case of the Derelict Assessment Center in Manhattan’s Upper West Side neighborhood. The impetus for the center’s creation in June of 1981 was not Callahan v. Carey (the historic decree mandating that the municipal government provide shelter to all homeless men was not signed until August of that year), but rather a state initiative to provide funds for the care of former patients of psychiatric institutions. ²⁵ The center would assist the “thousands of vagrants and former mental patients” who, according to a 1981 New York Times article, were “visible all over the West Side.” ²⁶ Rather than directly provide shelter, the Assessment Center would provide showers and meals to its clients, and would be staffed by social workers equipped to help clients access drug and alcohol recovery programs, psychiatric treatment, emergency shelter, and permanent housing.

Upper West Side residents quickly moved to protest the city’s plan. The telegrams and letters that Mayor Koch received in the weeks and months following Community Board 7’s meeting—in which the board approved the Derelict Assessment Center—suggested that the new center would compromise the stability of the surrounding neighborhood and the safety of its inhabitants. These letters provided few details of the danger “derelicts” were thought to cause; instead, protestations revolved around the embodied presence of unhoused people as a population that did not conform to residents’ aspirational views of the neighborhood. For instance, Doug and Dana Wyles wrote, “While as long-time West Siders, we agree that such services are necessary, we feel that they would be better located in a commercial neighborhood. Ours is a solidly upwardly mobile middle class neighborhood with many children.” ²⁷

The process, however, by which the neighborhood acquired its “solidly upwardly mobile middle class” population was far from organic. Rather, it was largely the result of the previous three decades of urban renewal and the citizens’ activism that surrounded it. ²⁸ The West Side Urban Renewal Area (WSURA), one of New York City’s most ambitious urban renewal projects, spanned a twenty-block stretch from West 87th to West 97th Streets, Amsterdam Avenue to Central Park West. Had it been completed, the project would have included a mix of high-, middle-, and low-income residences in an area that the city had long classified as a slum. ²⁹ But the neighborhood’s growing population of white middle-income residents contested the city’s plan, arguing that low-income housing would negatively affect the character of the Upper West Side. ³⁰ In a lawsuit that extended over the 1970s, a group called CONTINUE (Committee of Neighbors to Insure a Normal Urban Environment) contended that the development of public housing in the WSURA would violate the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development’s guidelines on maintaining the natural and social environment of a neighborhood. As lawyer and housing advocate John Douw observed, this amounted to arguing that poor people were an “environmental hazard,” and not part of the “normal urban environment.” ³¹

The specter of mental illness also informed Upper West Side residents’ protestations. By the 1970s, the city and state governments had increasingly come to rely upon the Upper West Side’s abundant supply of SRO apartments to house mentally ill and intellectually disabled people who might have once been institutionalized. One organization, the West Side Community Task Force on Single Room Occupancy Housing, claimed that “former patients were, in some instances, literally transported in buses to our neighborhood and dumped into SRO hotels,” where they were then left to “wander the streets of Broadway.” The Task Force’s report vacillated between describing this population as helpless and dangerous: they were both “preyed upon by criminals” and also criminals themselves, implicated in the neighborhood looting that followed the citywide blackout of July 1977. ³² With little proof of this connection, though, it seemed that most of the threat SRO residents posed to the Upper West Side came in the form of their bodily and behavioral difference.

Upper West Siders’ responses to the proposed Derelict Assessment Center bore the marks of this history; their letters to Mayor Koch reveal the extent to which they believed the neighborhood’s character was threatened by a facility for homeless and marginally housed people. ³³ Francis Lackner, for instance, wrote that the center would “drive out those who are attempting to improve and invest in this depressed neighborhood.” ³⁴ Others expressed their fears that the center “will lead to many disruptions at a time when the West Side is beginning to take pride in itself and people are feeling optimistic,” or, more bluntly, that the center would ruin “what is now one of the few livable residential areas in Manhattan.” ³⁵ Reactions to the presence of homeless people on city streets existed along a historical continuum that singled out poor people as undesirable neighbors and as illegitimate presences in public space. Upper West Side residents understood poor people as destabilizing forces in their community and feared that the Derelict Assessment Center would lead to the dereliction of the neighborhood itself.

Few could point to any concrete examples of criminal behavior. What they could—and did—point to again and again was bodily disorder: the homeless were “half naked”; they “wandered the streets,” aimless and sometimes delusional; the scent of urine and feces clung to their bodies; they were, in the words of one letter writer, “human pollution.” ³⁶ Susan Levin argued that the “physical and mental problems,” as well as the “skin ulcers, dirt, and lice so many homeless people exhibit” needed to be treated in a “medically-oriented setting” for which the Derelict Assessment Center was inappropriate. ³⁷ And Doug and Dana Wyles warned the mayor that the center would increase the prevalence of hepatitis in the neighborhood. ³⁸ The real danger of derelicts, then, lay in their bodily misbehavior: public defecation and sleeping, unwashed appearance and odor, and delusional-seeming language and actions. The danger lay in the very fact of homeless people’s unsheltered existence and the embodied qualities it laid bare in the city’s public spaces. ³⁹

As municipal documents and citizens’ letters attest, homeless men were the most frequent focus of neighborhood residents’ fears. In her letter opposing the Derelict Assessment Center, Susan Levin chided Mayor Koch for his misleading characterization of the center’s potential clients, noting, “You spoke of a place for ‘shopping bag ladies,’ an accurate description of only some of the clients at the Amsterdam Center.” Homeless men, she added, were “hostile and violent.” Edith Rosenstock wrote to Mayor Koch that “children who attend school and elderly people like ourselves want to feel safe.” And one anonymous parent wrote, “Having a teen age daughter that must go to school thru this area . . . worries me.” ⁴⁰ None of the letter writers explicitly stated what fate might befall those who would have to walk past the Derelict Assessment Center, yet their words imply that the center’s clientele could inflict violence upon groups typically thought of as vulnerable, including children, young women, and the elderly. ⁴¹

Upper West Side residents further feared that the Derelict Assessment Center would make their neighborhood a “dumping ground for the entire city.” ⁴² One wrote of how the center would “collect homeless people” and lead to the “traumatization” of the neighborhood. Such comments implied that the center would bring outsiders into the community, making the Upper West Side, as one resident put it, “a gathering place for undesirables.” ⁴³ Such descriptions suggested that the clients being served by the center would be outsiders to the community, but a letter from Minnie Horowitz suggested otherwise: she referred to the center’s potential clients as the “vagrants, alcoholics, and former mental patients who roam the streets of the West Side.” ⁴⁴ Even as her words acknowledged the presence of impoverished people residing in the neighborhood, they also drew a line of demarcation between those whose presence in the neighborhood was suitable or legitimate and those who simply “roam” it.

Like most New Yorkers, the Upper West Siders protesting the Derelict Assessment Center recognized that the city’s unsheltered people “desperately need help.” But they urged the city to find a different neighborhood in which to provide that help. “Couldn’t the Center for these unfortunate people . . . be put in a non-residential neighborhood?” asked Edith Rosenstock. ⁴⁵ Another person bluntly wrote, “I am a resident of West 87th Street, and I am opposed to having an assessment center in the middle of a residential neighborhood.” ⁴⁶ Minnie Horowitz articulated this mix of sympathy for the homeless and protectiveness for her neighborhood when she wrote, “this Center—to service perhaps thousands of these unfortunates—would be destroying what is now a good and fairly safe neighborhood.” ⁴⁷ As much as Upper West Side residents recognized the need for facilities to serve the city’s growing population of unhoused and tenuously housed people, they also drew upon a long history of envisioning the Upper West Side as an embattled neighborhood which needed to be preserved for middle-class residents.

The city never built the Derelict Assessment Center. The precise reasons are unclear, as neither newspaper nor archival documents followed the struggle to its conclusion, but it seems probable that the activism of neighborhood residents had a hand in defeating the center. However, it is also likely that the municipal government recognized that the Upper West Side was in fact a community in transition, and that the forces of gentrification were turning it from a “service ghetto” into a “solidly upwardly mobile middle class neighborhood,” even though such a transition was by no means complete in 1981. The municipal government recognized that the days when the Upper West Side was a “service ghetto” for the city were coming to an end.

Mayor Koch delivered his speech on New Yorkers’ “outbreak of selfishness” over one year after the protests against the Derelict Assessment Center. ⁴⁸ Homeless shelters and services often took center stage during this period as the city’s homelessness rate continued to rise dramatically and as the city government struggled to fulfill the mandate of Callahan v. Carey. At the moment of his speech, Koch was particularly incensed by protests in Harlem against a men’s shelter the city opened in the building that had formerly housed Public School 156 on Eighth Avenue and 155th Street. But he no doubt also had in mind two other recent protests: one in East New York, Brooklyn, where residents had demanded that the city shutter a hastily opened congregate men’s shelter in the old Public School 63 building; the other in the former Sydenham Hospital building on Manhattan Avenue in Harlem, which itself had been the site of a fierce battle over the city’s decision to close the hospital’s doors fewer than two years earlier. The rhetoric of these protests did not differ substantially from that of Upper West Side residents protesting the Derelict Assessment Center, but the city’s response to the protests—and the eventual outcome—demonstrates the differences that existed between the neighborhoods.

East New York

After the August 1981 signing of the Callahan v. Carey consent decree, East New York was the first neighborhood to experience upheaval. On October 21, 1981, the Human Resources Administration (HRA) opened a 400-bed men’s shelter at P.S. 63, an elementary school that the city had closed the previous year. HRA claimed that the decision to use the building as a shelter was a last-minute one, spurred by a Manhattan Supreme Court judge’s order just one day earlier that the city must immediately create a facility for the hundreds of men who were still not adequately sheltered. Yet East New York residents suspected otherwise: at a community-wide meeting in early November, residents noted that the city had carefully maintained the building since its closure the previous year, leading Jack Deacy, deputy commissioner of public affairs for HRA, to admit that the building had in fact been “under active consideration” as a shelter site for some time. ⁴⁹

In a retrospective interview, Koch’s Deputy Mayor Nathan Leventhal conceded that in the early 1980s, the city’s tactics for opening shelters were often secretive and swift:

. . . Nobody wanted homeless shelters, which they don’t today either, but they were really refusing. Forget it . . . So what I did is I—we opened homeless shelters regularly at two in the morning. And I would usually tell the borough president in advance and they would say, “Fine, do what you have to do and then I’ll blast you in the papers the next morning.” I said “fine.” And so that’s how we did it . . . We’d take schools, under-utilized schools. It was a real emergency kind of situation. ⁵⁰

Leventhal’s blunt reminiscence confirmed what East New Yorkers had suspected: the city had planned to place a shelter in their community without consulting them. While Leventhal’s words indicate that early-morning covert shelter openings became standard operating procedure for the city, they stand in sharp contrast to the prolonged process of debate and bureaucratic procedure that preceded the (failed) opening of the Derelict Assessment Center on the Upper West Side just a few months earlier. There, the Derelict Assessment Center was subjected to the (nonbinding) approval of the neighborhood’s community board, which had the effect of alerting community members to the plan, giving them time to mobilize before the center’s opening. No such transparency existed with the East New York men’s shelter: neighborhood residents—including members of local Community Board 5—learned of its opening after the fact, leading one shocked neighborhood resident, Clint Wike, to describe himself as “an angry parent,” noting, “this was dumped on me without me having any say.” ⁵¹

To many East New Yorkers, the city’s covert tactics represented more than simple ineptitude: they also signaled the city’s lack of respect for or interest in the future of the neighborhood, confirming a decades-long pattern of discrimination and neglect. East New York experienced a trajectory similar to many urban neighborhoods in the United States following World War II. A combination of white flight, bank redlining, discriminatory federal loan policies, residential segregation enforced by realtors and landlords, and commercial and governmental disinvestment left the neighborhood’s housing stock and infrastructure decrepit, and its mostly black and Latino residents with few options for geographical mobility or economic advancement. By the late 1960s, the neighborhood was in a state that historian Walter Thabit described as “almost total collapse.” ⁵²

This legacy was by no means a thing of the past in 1981, as residents were all-too-aware. As one East New Yorker put it,

There’s a complete lack of city services in our area: street lights are out, potholes are all over the place, sanitation facilities are shot, and our park is completely devastated, and people are afraid to walk out in the streets after dark. ⁵³

A number of neighborhood associations had worked for years—with virtually no assistance from the city—to improve East New York’s housing stock and to create programs that would support the community. Since the closing of P.S. 63 in 1980, local civic leaders had been moving forward with plans to use the building as a headquarters for an East New York business development corporation, which they hoped would spur the area’s economic improvement. But as C. Moore, president of the local Bedford Friendship Block Association, noted after the shelter’s opening: “Nobody wants to come to East New York now.” ⁵⁴ East New Yorkers had long been working to reverse the tide of commercial and municipal disinvestment from their neighborhood, but the shelter, they feared, was a calamitous roadblock on the fraught path to neighborhood recovery.

Harlem

The next year, a similar scenario unfolded in Harlem when the city opened a 200-bed facility for homeless men in the recently closed P.S. 156 building. Like the closure of P.S. 63 in East New York, the closure of P.S. 156 in Harlem was merely the latest episode in a trajectory of municipal disinvestment that had characterized the historically black neighborhood for decades. ⁵⁵ Harlem residents organized continuous protests outside of the facility, eventually compelling city officials to meet with them. The meeting was fruitless, however, as Mayor Koch declared that Harlem residents would have to convince him that the city’s decision to place a shelter in their neighborhood was “wrong,” a task at which he apparently doubted they would succeed. And, in fact, the shelter remained. ⁵⁶

At protests against the P.S. 156 shelter, Harlem residents cited community safety as a primary reason that they opposed the shelter. Its location near a public school and two public housing developments was a particular sore point, as parents and concerned community members urged Mayor Koch to consider the safety of neighborhood children. Outside the shelter, one protestor’s handwritten sign summed up the sentiment: “GET RID OF THE BUMS. WE WANT OUR COMMUNITY SAFE, CLEAN, AND FREE OF DISEASES FOUR (sic) OUR RAISING CHILDREN!!!!!” ⁵⁷ Such protestations are virtually indistinguishable from those of the Upper West Side community members who, just one year earlier, cited neighborhood vitality and their children’s safety as their primary reasons for objecting to the Derelict Assessment Center.

In both Harlem and East New York, as on the Upper West Side, neighborhood residents viewed homeless men in particular as a threat. Residents cited the potential for crime and violence that they feared the shelters’ clientele would bring to their respective neighborhoods. State Senator Major Owens, whose district included East New York, accused Mayor Koch of mischaracterizing the shelter’s population as “harmless, homeless old men.” As the New York Amsterdam News article that quoted him clarified, such characterization “is a deliberate falsification of the reality of the situation. Many of the men are neither old nor harmless,” but in fact “alcoholics, drug addicts and/or mentally ill young men.” ⁵⁸ At a meeting to discuss the P.S. 156 shelter in Harlem, the Reverend Lawrence E. Lucas, pastor of Resurrection Church, had even stronger words. Speaking against Koch’s assertion that he would wait to be proven wrong on the decision to open the shelter, Lucas asserted that what Koch really meant was, “If you show me some dead kids and raped kids, then I will reconsider.” ⁵⁹

In neighborhoods across New York City—neighborhoods that spanned the racial and socioeconomic spectrum—homeless men were understood as a particular risk. Their bodies were associated with disease, addiction, and criminal and sexual deviance. Furthermore, both Harlemites and East New Yorkers—like Upper West Siders—understood homeless men as foreign threats that infiltrated their communities. Just as Upper West Siders worried that a Derelict Assessment Center would make their neighborhood a “dumping ground” for the entire city, so too did Harlem and East New York residents understand the homeless being brought to newly opened shelters in their neighborhoods as outsiders. In East New York, local activist and former conservative Republican state assemblyman Vito P. Battista accused the city of trying to “get all the homeless men off the Bowery so they can put high-rise buildings there.” ⁶⁰ In Harlem, protests against another proposed men’s shelter in the building that had formerly been Sydenham Hospital leveled similar accusations at the city. A group calling itself Community Residents of Harlem distributed a flier proclaiming that a men’s shelter at Sydenham “will mean destruction to the Harlem community.” ⁶¹

This crazy plan will bring over 400 drug addicts, rapists, killers and mental rejects to the Harlem community. The Outsiders, mostly white homeless men, will be transported by buses from the Bowery to Sydenham.

The characterization of the shelter’s clientele as white served to reinforce the men’s outsider status in relation to the majority black Harlem community. Whether or not the characterization was based in fact (and it was most likely not, as New York’s homeless population was, by 1982, increasingly comprised of black men), it highlights the extent to which many Harlem residents believed their community to be under siege by the municipal government. It also is merely one component of the broader racial analysis groups like Community Residents of Harlem made. Their flier continued,

HARLEM NEEDS DECENT HOSPITALS, DECENT HEALTH CARE FACILITIES, AND DECENT HOUSING—NOT A CRIME RIDDEN DESTRUCTIVE MEN’S SHELTER. The Men’s Shelter for the Sydenham building is a plan devised by Mayor Koch as a vindicted [sic] way of punishing the Blacks for voting against him for Governor. He selected Sydenham because it is symbolic to Blacks throughout New York State . . . WHY SHOULD THE HARLEM COMMUNITY BE OVERCROWDED WITH THE OUTSIDE HOMELESS MEN AND THE WHITE COMMUNITIES ARE EXCLUDED AND PROTECTED FROM THE HOMELESS? It is okay to destroy the Black communities by racist standards. It should be noted that all of the City shelters are located in Black and Puerto Rican communities.

Harlem residents had good reason to feel that they were being punished by the municipal government: since Koch’s election in 1978, little had changed in their neighborhood, even as neighboring communities began to see improvement. Instead, areas like Harlem and East New York watched as developers began to renovate residential buildings and as new businesses opened in other neighborhoods. In addition, most of the schools and hospitals the city closed in the interest of fiscal “austerity” after 1975’s near-bankruptcy were in low-income neighborhoods of color. ⁶² Sydenham was just one such site; in Harlem the municipal government had also closed Logan Hospital and repurposed Metropolitan Hospital as an addiction treatment facility, thus taking away the emergency services and clinics upon which many uninsured Harlemites (as well as those insured by Medicaid, which many private hospitals and doctors did not accept) had relied for medical care. Thus, as communities like Harlem and East New York were losing vital services, they were gaining facilities like congregate homeless shelters that drastically altered the population and landscape of their neighborhoods.

In a memo to mayoral staff member Clark Whelton, Koch emphasized his “contempt” for those protesting city shelter sites, including a neighborhood priest. He contemplated writing an opinion piece for a local newspaper in which he asks Reverend Lucas, “Father, 25 days before Christmas and no room in the inn?” invoking the biblical story of Jesus’s birth in a manger after his homeless mother, Mary, was turned away by an innkeeper. ⁶³ The editorial staff of the New York Amsterdam News offered a more nuanced analysis of the issue that Koch was willing to give. “The Harlem residents who are demonstrating against the use of P.S. 156 are outraged because they feel that their neighborhood was chosen as a site for a shelter without regard for their views,” the editors noted. “It would,” however, “be shameless for anyone to suggest that the homeless by definition are undesirable and therefore unwelcome.” ⁶⁴ This sentiment was echoed in several letters to the editor, where readers urged Harlem residents to rise to the occasion (“The mayor has presented us with a challenge and an opportunity to turn despair into triumph,” wrote Mrs. Julian Jordan), and, more cynically, to direct their protest toward other, more pressing concerns, such as the prison work release programs located in Harlem, and to accept a new homeless shelter. ⁶⁵

But Harlemites’ accusations of racism could hardly be dismissed out of hand: of the six city-run homeless shelters in New York City in 1982, four were in majority poor, majority nonwhite neighborhoods, and one other was on Ward’s Island, which had no residential population. ⁶⁶ And many politicians, and civic and religious leaders agreed with local residents that racial bias motivated the siting of homeless shelters in New York City. As Reverend Lucas asked at the public meeting on the P.S. 156 shelter, “Why do all the jails have to be in Chinatown, and why do all the shelters have to be in Niggertown or Spictown?” ⁶⁷

Conclusion

Reflecting in February 1983 on the heated antishelter battles that had characterized the previous two years, David J. Stern, executive director of the Upper East Side’s Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter, noted, “When Harlem protested, they were fighting for neighborhood survival.” The previous month, the city of New York had opened a men’s shelter at the Upper East Side’s Seventh Regiment Armory, and Stern’s Neighborhood Coalition for Shelter had been instrumental in mobilizing community support. No protests accompanied the shelter’s opening; in fact, community members had welcomed the homeless men with donations of clothing and pastries. Although Stern admitted that he had “no easy answers” for why residents of the wealthy, predominantly white Upper East Side responded so affirmatively to the new shelter, he hypothesized, “A shelter can tip the scales sometimes. It’s not going to tip the scales on the Upper East Side. People here are not going to flee because of a shelter.” ⁶⁸

The idea that a facility for homeless men would “tip the scales” in a less secure area, leading to (or reinforcing) its decline, did indeed seem to inform the fears of New Yorkers in Harlem, East New York, and the Upper West Side. As Stern acknowledged, neighborhood stability was one key factor in the successful integration of a homeless shelter: if community members felt that their neighborhood was secure and well cared for by citizens and city, fears of its demise might be less likely to arise. Community involvement was another factor: the opening of the shelter at the Seventh Regiment Armory marked the city’s first successful attempt to collaborate with community members on the opening of a facility for the homeless. Upper East Siders had also previously been involved in the creation of a private shelter for homeless women, and Stern hypothesized that that first positive experience “made it easier for the armory shelter to work.” Facilities for the homeless were not—Stern’s comments implied—particularly desirable, and yet their presence did not have to mean the death of the surrounding neighborhood.

The Upper East Side’s experience, however, was an exception to the rule. As Stern noted, the neighborhood’s location, demographics, and history of homeless aid efforts made it vastly different from other neighborhoods. ⁶⁹ Throughout much of the 1980s, the municipal government continued to open shelters using the policy that geographer Sharon Lord Gaber labeled “sneak ’em in,” opening (or attempting to open) multiple shelters without notifying community members or community boards. ⁷⁰ The municipal government clearly did not apply its homelessness policy equally in all neighborhoods, but rather weighed the political costs and benefits of working with—or ignoring—community members’ interests.

Residents across New York City reacted with both sympathy and disgust to the increased presence of unhoused people in public space, and antishelter protests reflected this ambivalence; but protests also stemmed from many New Yorkers’ deep distrust of and frustration with the municipal government. Mayor Koch’s condemnation of antishelter protests as an “outbreak of selfishness” grossly mischaracterized the situation. As City Limits analyzed in a special 1987 issue titled “The NIMBY Dilemma,”

Unlike Koch’s older technologies—like calling his opponents “wackos,” NIMBY is subtle and lethal. It is a kind of verbal neutron bomb that allows the mayor’s policies to remain standing, while decimating all serious criticisms of his wasteful and wrongheaded housing and homeless programs and obscuring the merits of alternative programs proposed by critics. NIMBY undermines the credibility and honesty of his opponents, portraying them as narrow, mean, and self-interested. ⁷¹

Indeed, housing and homeless advocacy groups—including the Coalition for the Homeless, the organization founded by Robert Hayes, the lead lawyer in Callahan v. Carey—remained critical of the Koch administration’s tactics to shelter homeless New Yorkers. Throughout the 1980s, the city continued to open large congregate shelters in low-income, nonwhite neighborhoods with little warning to or dialogue with the surrounding community. ⁷²

Examining protests against homeless facilities provides crucial insight into some of the most dramatic changes taking place in cities in the late twentieth century. In the wake of decades of disinvestment, and on the cusp of New York City’s rapid but uneven gentrification, these protests revealed city residents’ desires to make their communities safer and more livable, and their frustration with the negligence of the municipal government. By identifying homeless people and the facilities that served them as problems in need of solving, protests also foretold a growing phenomenon in urban areas around the country, where the removal of undesirable behaviors, bodies, and facilities was equated with the improvement of “quality of life.” Although the term “quality of life” is most famously associated with New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1993-2001), Ed Koch had used the term since early in his mayoralty; it guided the Koch administration’s understanding of how to both formally and informally police the people and acts they considered to be public nuisances. Striking a balance between promoting “quality of life” or “urban civility” and staying within (or cautiously testing) the legal parameters of individual civil liberties appeared to be a constant focus of members of the Koch administration. ⁷³ Considering the contexts in which antishelter protests took place is thus crucial to understanding the specific circumstances that led activists on the Upper West Side, in East New York, and in Harlem to confront homelessness and attempt to shape the future of their respective neighborhoods. It is also crucial to understanding the politics of class, race, and geography that would be embodied by many in New York City—and cities around the United States—by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.