It’s the same old story at a new location, as the NYPD was called by city officials in to break up a protest against building a homeless shelter in Sheepshead Bay, says Assemblyman William Colton (D—Gravesend, Bensonhurst, Bath Beach and Dyker Heights), who has been leading opposition to a homeless shelter proposed for 86^th Street and 25^th Avenue since fall, 2023.

The latest incident, which occurred on April 30 outside the proposed shelter site at 2134 Coyle Street, mirrors police action that occurred last July outside 2501 86^th Street. In both cases, large numbers of community residents, many of them seniors, mobilized in opposition to the city’s plan, stationing themselves outside the site. In the most recent incident in Sheepshead Bay, police – who erected barricades and attempted to disperse protesters, allegedly pushing and abusing some of them -- arrested some of the protesters who were encamped adjacent to the site.

“Again, the city seems deaf to the sensible objections of neighborhood residents, and is resorting to intimidation to try and bully the community into submission,” said Assemblyman Colton. “It seems as if city officials are using the NYPD as a private security force for the benefit of greedy developers instead of listening to constituents, who understand that homeless shelters are not solutions to the issue of homelessness, that they do not benefit the homeless people they are supposed to serve, and that they negatively impact the neighborhoods in which they are built.”

The protesters outside the Coyle Street site appear to have used the 86^th Street protest – in which community members have had a daily presence adjacent to the site -- as a model. As of this writing, the protest adjacent to 2501 86^th Street has gone on for 290 consecutive days.

In the case of Coyle Street, Assemblyman Colton noted, the community has also had to contend with having been initially deceived, having originally been told that affordable housing would be constructed at the site.

“The irony, of course, is that affordable housing with appropriate support services available as necessary is the real solution to the crisis of homelessness,” Assemblyman Colton stressed. “And the $8 billion in taxpayer money that is spent annually on warehousing our homeless neighbors in shelters would go a long way toward constructing new permanent affordable housing and renovating existing affordable housing that now stands empty, instead of further enriching politically-connected developers and the executives who run the organizations that administer the shelters.”