By FrumNews.com

Crown Heights, NY — New York City is dumping 150 homeless people into Crown Heights, literally—and isn’t telling the community.

People familiar with the matter told FrumNews.com that the city will soon house homeless adults at the Ramada by Wyndham Hotel on Empire Blvd in Crown Heights.

Community Board 9 (CB9) was very verbally informed by the city ahead of the move, set to start June 1.

After some digging, FrumNews.com acquired a letter from the city to Fred Baptiste, the chair of Community Board 9 (as well as a video of the city pushing Community Board 9).

In the letter, Jamar Hook, NYC Deputy Commissioner of Intergovernmental Affairs, said the city plans to use 140 beds at the Ramada Hotel, until the end of summer 2026. “To ensure continuity of services, DSS-DHS will transition intake operations to an alternative site in Manhattan starting on May 1, 2026, and has transferred the assessment beds from the Bellevue site to several alternative sites elsewhere in the City. The collateral impact of the movement of these assessment beds has required that we seek alternative shelter sites to accommodate the capacity needs of our single adult men population, including this site on Empire Boulevard.”

“The city is taking their crisis to destroy our community,” an askan told FrumNews.com. “It’ll be four months of gehenom!”

The Meeting

CB9 discussed it at the April executive meeting, with one saying there was no prior notice. When asked why there was no public hearing, the response is “I don’t know!” adding, “I don’t know when the contract hearing is. I didn’t receive any information about the contract hearing. They likely will never send information about the contract hearing. And even if they did, who’s gone?”

“Because the developer of that building is notorious for building hotels that turn into shelters. He does this all over the city,” one CB9 member commented at the meeting. Another retorted, “Well, at $400 a night for a room, it’s a great deal for the city!” Another commented, “It is just not a tourist-class hotel.”

“When it says ‘temporary,’ that’s just BS… It’s temporary for the residents, right?” Members complained that the neighborhood was the only one targeted for a homeless shelter:

“[W]e need to have a response to this. We need to also engage the local council member, and we need to talk about what are the real numbers for fair share here—because I think that this needs to be brought back; you can’t tell me they couldn’t find anywhere else in Brooklyn that had a hotel or whatever.”

“They did from this, or you know what part of the problem is the electeds need to understand this, because this is part of the reason why we always push back because these are the things that always happen and these are the games that happen, ‘oh yeah sure I’m going to build a hotel, then I’m going to charge this. [But] what if I don’t get full occupancy, the city will be my best client, and they’ll pay my top rate.’”

“This is what happens consistently, and that goes part of the land allian use question again going to the fair use aspect of it as well, where it’s like operate.”

Why Now?

But why now? Because Mayor Zohran Mamdani closed a dilapidated shelter in Midtown Manhattan, he has chosen to scatter the homeless individuals across the city. It’s similar to former Mayor Adams’ move to rent out Hotels across the city during the migrant crisis.

In recent years, several hotels in NYC have been converted into emergency shelters or temporary housing, more than in any other area of the city. Hotels like Ramada lack the robust on-site medical, security, psychiatric, and job placement services required for successful reintegration.

The city’s dysfunction is so bad that they are taking up hotels again. And they won’t make it public, it wants to sneak the homeless into the neighborhoods of the outer boroughs—Queens, Bronx, Staten Island or Brooklyn—because they believe there won’t be pushback. It has become a permanent “temporary” solution that the city uses at the community’s expense.

There has been no public meeting, no outreach beyond the Community Board, no efforts to engage with the Jewish community encircling the shelter, and no additional security.

The Mamdani administration sees the Community Boards as the only factor when deciding what happens in the community, and when pushed back, they will override them, while local pols look the other way.

It’s not an isolated event. Nearby, the city is pushing another homeless shelter at the site of the Kingsboro psychiatric center, boxing in the thriving community, as it did previously with the homeless shelter at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory.

“They are pushing us out,” a local aksan told FrumNews.com. “In the north, they added and turned the Bedford-Atlantic Armory into a massive shelter; in the south, at Kinsbrook. Now on Empire. What’s next? Another on Kingston?”

In Boro Park, FrumNews.com previously reported that the city is pushing for a major homeless shelter at 50th St. and 10th Ave, which would limit the growth of the Boro Park community.