City to Move 110 Unvetted Men Into Sheepshead Bay Motel Shelter

One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world.”
— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn,

There is a building at 3218 Emmons Avenue in Sheepshead Bay where fifty-five families with children currently sleep. The parents work. The kids go to school down the block. Some of them go to church on Sunday. They have been there long enough to become neighbors, which is the whole stated point of a family shelter, and which is precisely what the city is now about to undo.

On July 9, Councilwoman Inna Vernikov sent formal letters to the Department of Social Services demanding a halt. The plan is to move those families out and move 110 single adult men in. DHS has confirmed that none of the incoming men will be subject to criminal background checks. The building faces Lew Fidler Park, where children play.

Vernikov's language is not diplomatic, and it should not be. "Not only is it inhumane and inconsiderate to transfer out these families who integrated into Sheepshead Bay," she wrote, "but this will be devastating for the surrounding neighborhood and community." She named what comes with a single-adult-male shelter dropped into a residential block: loitering, drugs, criminal activity. Southern Brooklyn does not need to be warned about this. It has already lived it.

The vetting question is the one that should end the conversation. DHS confirmed that no criminal background vetting will take place, which means, in Vernikov's words, "leaving room for potential sex offenders and convicted felons to come in contact with our children." A city agency put that in writing, about a building across the street from a playground, and assumed nobody would notice.

Then there is the operator. The facility is run by BHRAGS. Its principals are currently under federal indictment on fraud and bribery charges involving $1.3 million. The city is aware of this and is proceeding anyway. Vernikov asked the obvious question, which is why nobody at DHS appears to have asked it: "There are countless shelter and social services providers in the city; is there not one capable of being scaled up that would be more deserving of this contract?"

The siting logic fails on its own terms. Sheepshead Bay and its neighbors are more weakly connected to employment and social services than other parts of the city. Men without work and without services are men with time and pressure, and the letters note the predictable consequence: theft and larceny go up. Vernikov is blunt about the alternative. "There are countless Comfort Inn-style motels across the city that are not in densely populated residential neighborhoods, and are better connected to nearby transit and employment services, making DHS's reasoning unsound."

The 61st Precinct numbers since the site opened as a family shelter last year are already moving in the wrong direction. Shootings up sharply. Retail theft up. Rape reports doubled. Residents report car break-ins, open drug use, and people loitering by the park. That is the baseline. The city's proposal is to add one hundred and ten unvetted single adult men to it and hope.

What Vernikov is asking for is not radical. Cancel the transfer. Explain in writing why BHRAGS keeps the contract while its principals face federal charges. Detail the safeguards for the residents inside and the neighbors outside. Say whether anyone in the administration ever considered handing this to a provider that has demonstrated "integrity and responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources."

These are the questions a functioning city government answers before it acts, not after a councilwoman forces the issue. That they are being asked at all, and that nobody has yet answered them, tells you what kind of government this is.

The residents of South Brooklyn have declined to wait for an answer that may never come. A press conference and protest against the conversion will be held at the site itself, 3218 Emmons Avenue, on Thursday, July 16, at 6 p.m.

The organizers are calling it what it is: a plan, under the Mamdani administration, to destroy a neighborhood. Whether the city hears them is a separate question from whether they show up. Only one of those is under their control.

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