One drawback to a city this large is that the  bureaucrats – most of them dedicated public servants – who formulate policy can’t be familiar with most of the neighborhoods their policies shape. 

The remedy for that was supposed to be community boards, originally conceived as Little City Halls in the Lindsay Administration.

But community boards can only be effective if they are kept in the loop about critical local projects.  We can’t think of a project more suited to community board review than the city’s decision to transform residential apartment buildings into transitional shelters for the homeless, yet Community Board 7 was kept completely in the dark about this until some teachers at PS 8 noticed what was happening. And the community only learned about what has been happening at 15-19 Mosholu Parkway because tenants called us when they saw our story about 3001 Briggs.

As many local residents have stated, their opposition is not a rejection of homeless people. Community Board 7 has been among the most hospitable to special needs housing programs; there haven’t been the typical knock-down drag-out, not-in-my-backyard protests that have beset other communities.

There’s much more at issue here. The buildings that have been substantially converted into shelters are some of the worst in the area. They have hundreds of serious housing code violations and many tenants have reportedly been harassed out of their buildings to make room for shelter residents. In both cases, tenant repairs were neglected while the landlords focused on renovating vacant apartments. The Department of Homeless Services (DHS) policy rewards the worst landlords with rents three times as much as previous tenants paid.

DHS says it will pull out of any buildings where there is evidence of tenant harassment, but they are doing nothing to uncover that evidence. They are not conducting an investigation.

We thought the city would have learned its lesson when it ended a similarly unpopular scatter-site housing program for homeless families several years ago.

This program may even be worse because it takes over large chunks of buildings to house a transient population. DHS says this time they are providing better security and social services, but is it really fair to impose this environment on regular tenants who clearly didn’t sign up to live in what is essentially a supportive housing facility?

Geraldeen Salvatorelli,  who visits her frail 91-year-old father at 3001 Briggs Ave. in Bedford Park says the building no longer has an on-site super and that she’s regularly scrutinized by security guards. “Looks like they’re turning the place into a prison,” she told us.

Should the city really be creating situations where residents of apartment buildings can only watch while their mini-communities are essentially taken over by the city?

We urge DHS to investigate the allegations of harassment in these buildings and to review a policy that, on the surface, addresses the problem of a growing homeless population, but in reality decreases the amount of scarce affordable housing and may even perpetuate homelessness.