FLATIRON — Two months after neighbors turned out in force to oppose a new homeless shelter on West 24th Street, the plans were shelved after the building’s owner decided to rent to another tenant, according to a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeless Services.
The building at 25 W. 25th St., formerly La Semana Inn, is now off the table as the site of a planned 47-bed shelter for homeless adults, DHS spokeswoman Lauren Gray told DNAinfo on Monday.
“The City had every intention of continuing to move forward with its plans for this location to meet the urgent need to bring homeless New Yorkers off of the street, but we have been notified that the landlord has decided to rent the 24th Street location to another tenant,” Gray said in an email. “If the landlord were to reconsider, we would again seek to move forward with this space.”
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DHS had originally teamed up with Breaking Ground, a service provider, to turn the former hotel into an emergency shelter, where homeless adults just coming off the streets could get a bed in a pinch.
But the project had stalled for nearly two months after neighbors flooded a Community Board 5 meeting in September, effectively shutting the meeting down. Representatives of Breaking Ground, the group that was going to operate the shelter, pledged to shelve the project until another meeting took place, but that meeting never materialized.
As recently as Oct. 21, a spokeswoman for Breaking Ground said the various partners in the project, including DHS, were still working to set up a community meeting about the plans. But on Monday evening DNAinfo New York learned that the owners had changed their minds.
With winter fast approaching, however, a spokeswoman for DHS told DNAinfo that the agency still intends to find spaces in the neighborhood to house the homeless as temperatures plunge and sleeping on the streets becomes perilous.
DNAinfo learned on Monday that the city has been renting a boutique hotel in Flatiron to house homeless families since August.
