NYC’s Largest Men’s Shelter Overcrowded with Migrants, Vagrants & Sex Offenders
By: Benyamin Davidsons
New York City’s Bellevue Men’s Shelter, at 30th Street and First Avenue in Kips Bay, has become inundated with newly arrived migrants. Already having been overwhelmed to the brink with homeless men, and known sex offenders, the shelter is now at an explosive point, due to the influx of illegal immigrants sent here after jumping the Texas border. This has translated in to havoc for the once-quiet residential neighborhood where the shelter is located. In the last six months, it’s gotten really, really scary,” one petrified resident of the block told the Post. “The situation appears to be reaching a tipping point.” The resident said the police recently contacted him asking about an armed robbery and a carjacking which occurred right in front of his home.
The massive 1,000-bed shelter, which has rooms accommodating between two to ten persons, serves as the city’s largest homeless shelter for single men. As reported by the NY Post, of late it has become ripe with overcrowding and fights, with the tensions revolving around the newly arrived asylum seekers. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, has been sending in busloads of migrants to NYC as well as other left-aligned cities across the country, in a bid to alleviate his state’s problem with the migrants. He says the Democratic-led cities which agreed with President Joe Biden’s open border policies should bear some of the grunt of the migrants. Six more busloads of migrants arrived in NYC on Saturday.
“We don’t want them here because, to be honest with you, to me they’re getting treated better than we do, and this is supposed to be ours,” said Darrell Pankey, a homeless resident who has been at the shelter for the past six months. “It’s gonna blow up any day now,” he added. Chaos has been reigning in the shelter of late. Per the Post, there have been 225 calls to 911 regarding the shelter from Aug. 1 through Sept 11. That’s up 33% from the 169 calls received for the same period in 2021, andrepresents the time frame when many new migrants have been placed at the shelter. Some 171 of the 911 calls were ambulance cases, up from 148 last year.
The building, built in 1929 as a former psychiatric hospital, is located between the Bellevue and NYU Langone hospital campuses, and it also currently serves as an intake center for the city’s shelter system. Ex-convicts on parole from state prison are sometimes also housed at the shelter, as per the state Department of Corrections and Community Supervision.
“This place is full to capacity. There ain’t no beds and they’re still sending them. They can’t fix this place fast enough to accommodate them,” said another homeless local, Jeffery Harris, who also claimed migrants have been stealing phones to try to call the family members they left behind. Last week, the Bellevue shelter and others were so full that the city simply couldn’t find beds for 60 men, most of them migrants, which is a breach of the court-ordered right to shelter law. Mayor Eric Adams has said the city’s shelter system is at a “breaking point”, pointing out that in all some 11,000 migrants have been sent to the Big Apple.
