West Side Rag » Some Homeless Residents Coming to UWS Hotel are Being

Posted on July 26, 2020 at 1:13 pm by Carol Tannenhauser

By Carol Tannenhauser

Some of the homeless men being transferred to The Lucerne Hotel on 79th Street this Monday are being moved from another hotel where there was friction with local residents, according to one of the homeless men.

The man, who goes by the name “Da Homeless Hero” and asked that we not use his formal name, says that there are many active drug users at the hotel and he is concerned that a similar situation will occur on the Upper West Side.

Da Homeless Hero.

On Thursday, Councilmember Helen Rosenthal and Project Renewal — the nonprofit that runs the shelter — announced that the men would be moved to The Lucerne, a hotel at 201 West 79th Street at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue on Monday. The men are coming from two East Village shelters — the Kenton Hall Men’s Shelter and the Third Street Men’s Shelter — both of which work with men dealing with drug addiction.

But some are not coming directly from those shelters, according to Da Homeless Hero. Instead they are coming from the Washington Jefferson Hotel on West 51st Street.

And there appears to have been tension with the community there. A real estate broker was fired a few weeks ago after confronting people who were standing in front of the hotel. The broker apparently rolled — or “threw,” according to a block association president — beer bottles at them. “I would just like to take a simple walk with my dog to the Dunkin’ Donuts, but now every day that walk requires stepping over multiple beer bottles, a used syringe, and a dirty condom,” the broker, Scott Sobol, told The Post. Another resident of the building that includes the hotel told ABC News that she now travels with pepper spray when she leaves her apartment.

Da Homeless Hero, who is 51 years old and has “struggled with homelessness” all his life after growing up in the foster care system, confirmed that there has been tension in that neighborhood. (Documents he sent to the Rag confirm he is a resident there.) “Things didn’t work out in the community,” he wrote in an email to the Rag.

DHS and Project Renewal “have pulled the wool over your eyes and led you to believe that you are receiving 283 men in recovery,” he wrote in a comment on our original story. “That is a lie. Most of those coming are active drug users who would rather stay where they at doing what they know than to go to a new area where they have to find out where to get their drugs, and where they can use without being bothered by law enforcement. The shelters we’re coming from are drug dens and the surrounding area is a haven for drugs. It won’t take long before they adapt to your community and find a way to make that a comfortable place to do what they’ve been doing. Substance use disorder is a complex issue and…