Mayor de Blasio has put the kibosh on a homeless shelter proposed for the Upper West Side, the man pushing the project claims.
Ron Edelstein, whose family owns the Imperial Court Hotel on West 79th Street, said a high-ranking city Department of Homeless Services official told him the mayor ordered the agency to reject his proposal to convert the 227-room building into apartments for 340 homeless people.
Anti-shelter pressure came from local elected officials, including Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, a former councilwoman.
“The people in DHS want to do this project. They love this project,” Edelstein said. “Gale Brewer leaned on de Blasio, and de Blasio caved and said no . . . That comes directly from the Department of Homeless Services.”
De Blasio rep Wiley Norvell denied the mayor was involved and called the claims “categorically false.”
Edelstein’s plan was submitted Jan. 31 in response to a city request for proposals for a “safe haven” for homeless seniors or couples.
Brewer denied lobbying the mayor on the hotel but said her stance on the issue of shelters is well known.
“I have talked to Mayor de Blasio’s staff and Mayor Bloomberg’s staff and told them these buildings should be used as permanent housing, not homeless shelters,” she said.
Rosenthal ripped the proposal and threatened a city takeover of the site in a Jan. 28 letter to de Blasio and Homeless Services Commissioner Gilbert Taylor.
“These shelters have been used as cash cows without delivering suitable services or assistance to the homeless and as a means for slumlords to harass the remaining permanent tenants,” she wrote.
The building now houses about 50 tenants in $400 rent-stabilized apartments.
If approved, the shelter would house 340 homeless people in 170 rooms and offer three meals a day, 24-hour nursing and security.
The city would pay $82 per room per day and $94 per day per person for food, services and staffing — an annual cost of $17.6 million. The city would not pay for the hotel’s conversion.
Edelstein said his family was losing money under a 2011 single-room-occupancy law that makes it difficult to rent rooms to tourists. They hired Trinity Multi-Service Center, which manages seven city shelters, to prepare their proposal.
Trinity’s proposal was well received by the DHS, said Sherwin Wilson, head of the Brooklyn-based firm.
“They said that the proposal was good, that it was something that they needed right away,” he said. “Two weeks later, it got rejected.”
The DHS’s Feb. 13 rejection letter offers no explanation other than to say the project “does not fit with the agency’s priorities.”