Mayor Mamdani defended his administration’s decision to close the 30th Street homeless intake center after an East Village community group sued the city over the planned replacement intake site in that neighborhood.
The suit, filed Monday, claims the plan to open a new city men’s intake center at 8 East 3rd St was rushed and undertaken without enough public review. It asked a judge to stop the project ahead of its scheduled May opening date.
The mayor said that the city had “urgent obligation,” both legally and morally, to transfer shelter intake to another site, because of the conditions at the current intake shelter near Bellevue Hospital.
“The conditions at the 30th Street Bellevue Intake Shelter have been unacceptable for years,” Mamdani said Tuesday. “We received expert guidance that they vacating that site was an urgent and immediate need, as opposed to a suggestion to consider in the years to come. And so as a result of that, we made the decision to take an action in the best interest of safety and to vacate.”
The city announced the move to the East Village in March, as part of the plan to close the dilapidated and sometimes violence-prone 30th Street center.
Occupants of the shelter were to be moved to other shelters across the city in time for the center to be closed at the end of April, and the East Village site is slated to be opened May 1. That site has already been serving as a homeless shelter.
The suit, filed by the neighborhood group and a few area residents in Manhattan Supreme Court, claims that the city improperly used emergency procedures in moving the site, allowing it to bypass certain public notice and review requirements.
When the Mamdani administration first announced their plans, the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless raised concerns about the tight timeline of the closure, saying in a statement that it “risks creating confusion and additional hardship” for homeless New Yorkers.