The night Jeffrey Wolford came in off the frigid sidewalk seeking warmth in Manhattan’s 30th Street Men’s Shelter last winter, it was too late to get a bed.
He was assigned a plastic chair, alongside 20 other men already dozing in the city’s biggest shelter, a major intake center for homeless people.
Just as he was nodding off, he looked down and saw a man rifling through his backpack, trying to steal his phone.
The two were wrestling on the floor when a shelter supervisor intervened. Wolford says he explained the attempted phone theft. But the supervisor told the thief to take a seat — and ordered Wolford back out into the cold.
Disgusted, he grabbed his belongings and ventured back out into the pre-dawn Arctic chill.
“Sleeping in the streets is preferable to that,” said Wolford, 33.
City Hall’s last official count in January found more than 3,500 homeless people on sidewalks or in the subways on a night when the temperature plummeted to 28 degrees.
Mayor Bill de Blasio Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Last week, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to train 18,000 city workers to call 311 when they see a homeless person to get more folks into city shelters, which house about 60,000 New Yorkers.
“The problem here is not (that) we don’t have a place to get someone that’s safe and where we can get them mental health services and substance misuse services, we have that,” he said. “It’s getting people to come in.”
But as winter approaches, homeless people living on the streets, in interview after interview, told THE CITY they’d rather take their chances on trains or sidewalks.
Dangers Loom All Over
The myriad dangers facing them are underscored by a recent spate of killings of homeless people. That includes the Oct. 5 beating deaths of four men sleeping on the streets of Chinatown — allegedly by a man twice arrested for committing crimes inside city shelters.
On Nov. 5, a homeless man allegedly fatally stabbed another homeless man outside an East Elmhurst, Queens, shelter. Four days later, a similar killing took place inside an Upper West Side shelter.
A memorial for Chuen Kwok, one of four homeless men murdered while sleeping on the street in Chinatown last month. Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Amid this violent landscape, THE CITY zeroed in on the shelter where Wolford says he was accosted and is often cited by homeless people as a place to avoid: the 30th Street Men’s Shelter in Kips Bay.
Our review of nearly 3,000 pages of internal records of dangerous and criminal activity inside 30th Street in 2017 and 2018 found:
• Serious incidents — such as assaults, death threats and possession of significant quantities of drugs — won’t necessarily get someone arrested or even kicked out.
• Violations of shelter rules often go without punishment.
• Repeat offenders have no trouble bedding down for the night in a shelter, even after multiple incidents in various city-run facilities. That was the case with the man accused of the Chinatown killings.
Reports Paint Grim Picture
The internal reports depict life inside 30th Street as teetering on the brink of anarchy at times: A client openly smokes crack in bed. Another runs from room to room, flicking light switches.
One resident whacks another in the head with a lock stuffed inside a sock. A handgun is hidden in a construction barrier just outside the building’s entrance.
Brass knuckles, stun guns, a hammer — all found inside lockers. An entire section of the shelter is known for “high drug activity.”
In April 2016, one 30th Street resident fatally slit the throat of another. In 2017 and 2018, the NYPD launched several drug sweeps to shut down rampant dealing.
Bellevue Hospital Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
At times, when residents commit violence against each other or staff — even against City Department of Homeless Services police — and there’s an arrest. But sometimes, there is no arrest.
Often that’s because the client is deemed to be mentally ill and is shipped off as an “EDP” — police-speak for “emotionally disturbed person” — to nearby Bellevue or Beth Israel hospital.
The reports obtained by THE CITY offer numerous examples of incidents that ended with an EDP designation — but without an arrest or summons.
In one instance, a shelter client who tried to push his way into an elevator past a security guard refused an order to stop — then kicked and bit a DHS police officer. Another client threw hot coffee on a staffer, burning the worker’s ankle.
Extended Shelter Stays
The 30th Street Shelter sits inside an intimidating 19th century red-brick fortress next to Bellevue Hospital. The huge shelter holds 851 beds and houses only single men.
As one of several intake facilities around the city, it serves as the gateway to the shelter system for tens of thousands of homeless men each year. Residents are supposed to stay temporarily until they can be sent to shelters around the city.
The 30th Street Men’s Shelter Photo: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
But the number of single men seeking shelter has risen recently, to more than 16,200 one night last week, while the quantity of available beds has not kept up. So 30th Street residents often spend months there before the Department of Homeless Services is able to find them a spot elsewhere.
As of last month, more than half the shelter residents had been living in a bureaucratic purgatory at 30th Street for an average of nearly 10 months.
‘The Worst Reputation’
“The 30th Street Men’s Shelter has the worst reputation of any men’s shelter in the city,” said Josh Dean, director of Human NYC, a non-profit homeless support group. “The quality varies from shelter to shelter, but the intake and assessment shelters are the shelters that are notoriously dangerous. And those are the shelters that are discouraging people from entering the system.”
Giselle Routhiere, policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit that has long labored to reform the city’s shelter system, agreed that 30th Street — in part because of its size — has long been considered the most dangerous shelter in the system.
She called the mayor’s assertion the system is safe “total bulls–t.”
“All of the problems that happen throughout the system are extreme at places like 30th Street. You can understand the reticence of people to go to places like that,” she said. “The idea that intake shelters are more chaotic is true.”