Two dozen destitute families with 37 school-aged kids were evicted from a Queens homeless shelter — despite desperate pleas for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to stop the displacements.
The evictions from the City View Inn in Long Island City began last weeks, shortly after the families received an abrupt notice that it’d would be converted into a shelter for single men, officials said.
The displacements quickly drew outrage from locals angry that the 25 families, whose children attended a nearby public school, would be relocated in the middle of their school year and a devastatingly cold, deadly winter.
They hastily organized an emergency protest, where Councilwoman Julie Won (D-Queens) decried the evictions as a callous holdover from the much-criticized migrant shelter policies of former Mayor Eric Adams — and called for Mamdani’s administration to put a stop to it.
“Stop these inhumane, Eric Adams-era practices of treating people like objects and property,” Won said during the protest, according to a CBS New York report.
“The new mayor must put an end to inhumane displacement policies for our migrant families,” Won added to The Post this week. “Let our children stay in their neighborhood shelter where they have built community within the last year and let them walk to their local school.”
City Hall officials on Friday defended the decision to convert the shelter along Greenpoint Avenue, arguing the brutal cold snap made it necessary to find sanctuary for adult homeless men.
“We moved with urgency to expand low-barrier bed capacity for single New Yorkers experiencing homelessness — reconfiguring and optimizing existing shelter space to meet the moment,” a City Hall spokesperson said, contending officials worked to accommodate the families’ needs.
“Because responding to a crisis isn’t just about adding beds. It’s about protecting people’s lives, their education, and their path to stability — all at once.”
But the evictions’ abruptness rankled locals who’ve long made peace with the migrant family shelter, which opened in 2018 as a “temporary” facility.
“We understand their plight and we were willing to hold on because it was still living up to the original intent, which was these were temporary and they would be closed,” said Tom Mituzas, a member of the local Blissville Civic Association.
“Why were the men more important than the people already living there? I don’t understand why there had to be a change. Why did they have to push them out?”
The Blissville Civic Association sent Mamdani and other local elected officials a Feb. 11 letter pressing for details about whether the single men’s shelter would be permanent or temporary.
Meanwhile, some families who lived in the shelter have been moved all the way into Jamaica, despite their children still remaining enrolled in PS 199 Maurice A. Fitzgerald School in Sunnyside, a stone’s throw away from the shelter, a spokesperson for Won said.
Won directed some of her fire at the Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park, an Adams appointee who recently tendered her resignation and who’s last day was Monday.
“Commissioner Park has a responsibility to keep families in their community,” Won said in a statement.
“DSS/DHS is cruelly evicting 37 children from their shelter without communicating an alternate location of where they will go,” Won added. “Now, 37 students are out of school in the middle of winter, without their education, community, or support system.”
City Hall officials said kindergarten through sixth-grade students are entitled to busing if they’ve been placed in temporary housing. Upper-grade students can receive OMNY cards, they said.