Guadalupe Fernandez-Soberon and her husband have lived at the family shelter inside the Harmonia Hotel in Midtown for the last two years. At 6 p.m. on Wednesday, they were told they would need to be out of their unit by 10 a.m. the next day. Her husband stayed up all night packing.
Thursday morning, the 63-year-old sat on a bus with several other families. She tried to explain to a deaf friend sitting next to her, in the limited sign language she knew, why she and her husband were getting off in Long Island City, while her friend had to stay on the bus and go to a second location in Brooklyn.
Harmonia’s residents were moved because of a sudden decision by Mayor Bill de Blasio to remove around 300 male shelter residents from the Lucerne Hotel on the Upper West Side. Ultimately, nearly 900 New Yorkers in city shelters will be shuffled around to accommodate the change. The choice to close down the Lucerne as a temporary shelter followed a well-funded legal campaign against the shelter and wide-spread anti-homeless rhetoric spreading on a neighborhood Facebook page.
Around 10,000 shelter residents across the city were removed from congregate shelters—settings that have a higher risk of COVID-19 transmission—and relocated into hotels for their own safety
Fernandez-Soberon uses a walker, and when she was shown her new room in a Long Island City shelter, she immediately realized she wouldn’t be able to bathe there. The room has a bathtub, but because of mobility issues in her legs, she needs a shower that she can walk into and sit down in.
“It’s broken me down so much,” she said, weeping outside the Harmonia where she’d returned the next day for a rally outside with local elected officials and community advocates. “It’s so inhumane, the way they’re moving people around like we’re luggage, furniture, musical chairs. We’re humans, you know.”
Shelter residents, elected officials, and community advocates rallied outside the shelter on Friday afternoon, urging Mayor Bill de Blasio to walk back his decision. Facing a mounting chorus of dissent, as well as a threatened lawsuit from Legal Aid Society, it appears the city has for now stopped moving people out of the Harmonia
A spokesman for DHS didn’t return repeated requests for comment Friday.
Outside the Harmonia shelter on Friday.
Denise Halley (center), outside the Harmonia shelter, being comforted by her friends.
“Even as late as this morning, staff were knocking on the doors of shelter residents and telling them to pack up,” said Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society, who has since been promised by city officials that no more people will be moved until those with disabilities can be properly accommodated. “They called me to say, ‘No we are definitely not moving anyone out anytime soon, not tomorrow, not this weekend. And we will continue to discuss what the plans should be.’”
Judith Jackson, the chief of staff at Services for the Underserved that runs the shelter, said they got word Tuesday that residents were supposed to leave by Friday. Now the final move out date is unclear and will be postponed until DHS can make proper accommodations for people with disabilities, she said. Once the shelter closes to make way for men from the Lucerne, the company plans to lay off all 41 employees at that location.
“It was pretty short notice for something that would be so disruptive on so many levels,” she said.
The back and forth was too much for Denise Halley, a 55-year-old home health aide, who’d been living at the shelter for three years with her daughter, trying desperately to qualify for an affordable apartment the whole time.
“I’m tired of moving, moving, moving, moving,” she said, sobbing, while two friends rubbed her shoulders in support. “Now you want to move us to somewhere far. I just want my own home. I’m tried of going around and around in circles. It hurts me.”
This article has been updated to reflect that Judith Jackson is chief of staff at Services for the Underserved, not CEO.
