NYC's largest homeless shelter closing

[deadparrot]

CHESTER, N.Y. - Every day, a bus picks up homeless men off the streets of New York City and takes them 70 miles out into the countryside to a shelter, in a practice that has been going on quietly since the Depression, when homeless people were called Bowery bums and fresh air was the solution to just about all ills.

The 1,001-bed Camp LaGuardia is New York City's biggest homeless shelter — and the only one surrounded by farms and trees — but its very existence is probably a surprise to many lifelong New Yorkers.

Now the city is closing it down.

While 73-year-old Camp LaGuardia was born of good intentions and what was then considered progressive thinking, some activists disapprove of it as an out-of-sight, out-of-mind answer to the city's homeless problem.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070226/ap_on_re_us/nyc_homeless_camp

[Monkeyman]

1. Let see there are more Homeless the ever before So lets give them no place to go

[phylny]

4. This facility

is absolutely huge, and is in a residential neighborhood where the citizens have been afraid for their safety and the safety of their children. I grocery shop near there, and at least once a week, security must come to help someone deal with a drunken or high resident. Often, young girls are verbally harassed by men lined up, waiting for the VOA van to bring them from the shopping center back to the shelter. There have been reports of residents urinating and defecating on surrounding property as well.

The men who live in this shelter are far away from the city and from the life that they know, as the setting for this shelter is rural/suburban. The closing of this facility is a good thing for all. Please read.

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Here's an excerpt from an article:
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/front/la-na-laguardia9jan09,1,2846083,full.story?coll=la-headlines-frontpage

(on edit, it appears that the above link requires you to register. If you have trouble, try this one, and scroll down to find the LA Times article):

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=camp+laguardia+chester+la+times&spell=1

All that will end this summer, when Camp LaGuardia shuts its doors. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has vowed to decrease the city's homeless population by two-thirds by the end of his second term, moving as many as possible into subsidized apartments. The city is getting out of the business of sheltering people for indefinite periods. Over the years, no facility has better epitomized that business than Camp LaGuardia, New York's largest shelter and its most easily forgotten.

Already, the population has been cut in half, to below 500. One recent departure was Adam Kropiewnicki, 61, a wordless, sweet-tempered Polish man known locally as "the Walker." Every morning for seven years, he set out on foot looking for work as a day laborer. But not until last fall did anyone call an interpreter to the site to speak to him in Polish, said Courtney Denniston, 27, a case manager supervisor.

"The first words out of his mouth were: 'Home. I just want to go home,'" Denniston said. He had come to the U.S. illegally to work as an asbestos handler, but when he lost the job, he had no money to fly home. He had a wife and children in Warsaw.

Volunteers of America, the nonprofit contracted by the city to run Camp LaGuardia, bought Kropiewnicki a one-way ticket to Poland. Staff members asked him to be ready at 2 p.m. on the day of the flight, but he was packed and sitting outside with his suitcases, beaming, at 8 a.m. Denniston loves to tell that story. "He had been waiting seven years for someone to ask him what he wanted," she said.

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More info here:
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dhs/html/press/pr111606.shtml

[Mojorabbit]

6. Can you imagine

being in a foreign country and for SEVEN years hoping to go home and not being able to communicate.
OMG

[WorldResident]

5. I don't think that's the motive of the NYC government

I think they're trying to get the homeless from living in temporary homeless shelters into subsidized housing. Coming from a podunk county in SE Texas, where there's only one homeless shelter for men and only one for women, with both of them run by churches, and the HUD waiting list is almost two years long, I think this is a brilliant strategy. Unfortunately, all too often in my hometown I see homeless individuals with little marketable skills who are stuck on the streets with all the bad influences that come from the streets.

[hashibabba]

2. Well, Bush said the economy is FANTASTIC! So why do we

need shelters for the poor and down and out? :sarcasm:

And Bush is making cuts to all the social programs in his 2008 budget. Axing over 161 of them. Bastard.

[struggle4progress]

3. Orange County didn't like the place and has been attacking it for years

Looks like the County is buying the property from the City

[Historic NY]

7. This place was a dumping ground..............

for years Camp La Guardia bus's came in with not only homeless but criminal element too. The city was too lazy to separate out those want for various crimes and just dumped them upstate. The camp cause lots of problems here mainly because the city wanted to get out of running it. Volunteers, wanna be police w/o powers all designed to put makeup on this bloated pig, from a century long past. There were many instances of terrific crimes in the surrounding communities involving these so-called-homeless. Why should the local community bear the burden of NY Cities homeless dump zone. the county tried for many years to negotiate with NY and the Mayor but to no avail. I for one won't miss the place.