Communities should host homeless

To the editor:

One of the problems of the city mishandling a problem is that it permits some of us to forget that the problem exists. This was the case with its affordable housing proposals earlier this year. It is the case now with regard to homeless housing.

I had to go along with the decision of my colleagues on CB 8 to condemn the city’s surreptitious placing of homeless families in the Van Cortlandt Motel after promising they would not do so. However, we can’t lose sight of the fact that housing the homeless, and other problem populations, is a huge problem and constitutes a humanitarian crisis that demands our attention.

I know that our opinion leaders feel that our area is over burdened by such populations. The same is true of every community in the city that I have lived in, including the Upper East Side and the Upper West Side. Yet these folks, the homeless, released mental patients, released offenders, our fellow citizens, need safe sanitary places to live where they will feel welcome.

Individual communities cannot have a veto power over the placement of problem populations, since the negativity is virtually universal. There needs to be a city-wide “fair share” formula allocating such populations among communities based on population, land area and space availability.  “Fair Share” legislation should be introduced into our legislatures, state and city, and then professionals should map the city on the basis of the factors listed above.  It will be a difficult and contentious process, but each of us shares a common humanity with the least fortunate among us, and every community needs to assume its fair share of what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as a burden.

David Kornbluh

David Kornbluh is an urbanist, a member of Community Board 8 and of the Steering Committee of Concerned Citizens for Change.