The Right to a Bed in Zohran Mamdani’s New York

Well before the Bellevue shelter reached its current state, people were trying to shut it down. “There’s been talk about restructuring, rebuilding the Thirtieth Street shelter for as long as I can remember,” Dave Giffen, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, told me. Muzzy Rosenblatt, who calls it a “giant monstrosity of a building,” was one of the first to take up the cause. Rosenblatt was a part of the task force that had helped establish the Department of Homeless Services (D.H.S.) in 1993 under David Dinkins, and served there for six years, including a stint as the acting commissioner, under Rudy Giuliani. The Callahan Consent Decree “is very specific,” Rosenblatt told me. “It’s about, you know, distances between beds and make sure there’s linen.” In the years after the nineteen-seventies fiscal crisis, the city had scrambled to check these rudimentary boxes by retrofitting the decaying real estate it had on hand: old armories, shuttered schools, the Bellevue psychiatric hospital. “That’s how we got into these really crappy buildings at the beginning,” Rosenblatt said. In 1994, he put together a plan to convert the Bellevue site to supportive housing—“and then I sold Giuliani on it!”—but it fell by the wayside, as did a later agreement to close it down after the Administration for Children’s Services opened its own intake facility nearby.

Today, Rosenblatt is the president and C.E.O. of the Bowery Residents’ Committee, a nonprofit that runs shelters, affordable housing, and other services, and has the city contract for homelessness outreach on the subways. He said he hoped that the closure of Bellevue would be “part of a larger plan to reëvaluate the customer experience” for New Yorkers entering the shelter system. “I’m a big fan of Danny Meyer, the restaurateur, and the whole notion of hospitality has to be at the core. If we want people to come in, we have to make them feel like we want them to come in,” he went on. “That is not the experience you have when you walk into Bellevue.”

Michael Bloomberg felt that the system hardly needed a Danny Meyer approach; in 2src12, in fact, he opined that “pleasurable” conditions in the shelters—as opposed to the post-recession economy—were encouraging longer stays. Yet Bloomberg, too, tried to close Bellevue. In 2srcsrc4, the D.H.S. announced that it would shut down intake operations in the building within the next two years, which did not happen, and in 2srcsrc8 the Economic Development Corporation proposed redeveloping the site as a luxury hotel and conference center, which did not happen, either.

Mamdani has connected homelessness policy to his broader emphasis on housing access and affordability: when he said, in December, that he was going to end Eric Adams’s sweeps of encampments, he noted that the strategy had been ineffective at moving people into permanent housing. A shelter like Bellevue might give homeless New Yorkers a place to sleep out of public view, but it offered crisis management rather than a long-term solution. Still, Giffen told me that he remained somewhat skeptical that the people his organization represents have had a real place in the new Mayor’s rhetoric. “ ‘Affordability’—that’s a tricky word,” he said. “ ‘Affordability’ means affordable to the middle class. It does not mean affordable to the people who are most in need of housing.” Giffen said that the Coalition had received word back in December from the Department of Social Services (D.S.S.), which oversees D.H.S., that Bellevue would finally have to close. The Mamdani administration’s decision, in this case, is less a matter of visionary change than of physical inevitability: long decrepit, the building is now officially approaching uninhabitability. (No definite plans for its future have been announced.)

When I visited Bellevue on a gray morning this week, it could have already passed for an abandoned building—boarded windows, an overflowing dumpster with a suitcase wedged on top. But it hadn’t shut down quite yet: although the shelter beds had cleared over the weekend, intake was still open, and a slow trickle of arrivals was visible at the entrance. Outside, underneath the sidewalk sheds surrounding the building, I spoke to a twenty-seven-year-old man who had stayed at Bellevue. (He preferred not to be identified by name.) He used the same word as the Mayor had in the announcement of the closure: “It’s not livable.” He had, nonetheless, lived there this winter starting in late December, except for a stint at his sister’s, when heat and hot water had gone out at the shelter during one of this winter’s snowstorms. He worked nights loading and unloading trucks; he said that he’d been told he was eligible for housing-voucher programs, but he didn’t know where he would live next.