Ready, Willing & Able | The Doe Fund

The president of The Doe Fund, George McDonald, confirmed yesterday that the new 400-bed shelter, expected to open in October 2001, is meant as part of the replacement for the 850-bed 30th Street Men's Shelter near Bellevue Hospital Center.

Word of the contract came as a surprise to the nonprofit operators of other homeless shelters in the city -- who said that they were astonished by the size and unusual length of the contract and that they had not been given a fair chance to compete for it.

It also surprised residents of the largely industrial neighborhood. Such shelters often provoke the opposition of neighbors, but many said yesterday that they would welcome this one.

"It wouldn't bother me," said Juan Perez, 33, who has lived for 10 years on Grattan Street, about a block from the site at 89-111 Porter Avenue. "Maybe I'd be a little bit more cautious. But you've got to put homeless people somewhere. If everyone says we don't want them, where will they go? As a Christian, that's the way I look at it."

But another Grattan Street resident, Estelle Barroso, 30, disagreed. "I don't think it's a good idea at all," she said. "I'd be very concerned. We don't know what these people are capable of doing. We already have pimps and prostitutes on this block and in this area. If this homeless shelter comes, we'll be surrounded."

The Doe Fund won the contract under the same accelerated process that recently became the subject of a fierce dispute between Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and City Comptroller Alan G. Hevesi, in the awarding of welfare-to-work contracts. Those contracts are on hold.

City Councilman Stephen DiBrienza, a Brooklyn Democrat who is chairman of the Council's General Welfare Committee, called the contract award "scandalous."

He added that $180 million is "an enormous amount of money," and said: "I see this as another example of the conflict of interest of this administration. It has the appearance of rewarding friends, or favoritism."

Mr. DiBrienza noted that Mr. McDonald was one of two homeless services providers -- out of 70 in the city -- who supported Mr. Giuliani's proposal to impose work requirements and other welfare rules on homeless adults as a condition of shelter. This week, a state court ruled that the city could not lawfully enforce the new rules, because they violated the 1981 consent decree establishing a right to shelter.

Mr. McDonald, whose organization has won national awards for its Ready, Willing and Able programs, which provide jobs and housing for the homeless, responded to the criticism with anger.

"It's an outrage if people suggest this is some kind of political payoff when I've been helping people for 20 years," Mr. McDonald said. His critics, he added, "are people who have no understanding of what work does to turn around the lives of people who accept personal responsibility instead of being victimized."

Officials at the city's Department of Homeless Services, which will hold a public hearing about the contract on Thursday, The Doe Fund won the contract on the merits, out of 21 applications. They said the city is negotiating with six other groups -- which they would not name -- for contracts to cover the balance of the 30th Street shelter beds.

The shelter is a major part of the city's homeless shelter system, serving as the entry point for all homeless men seeking emergency shelter, as well as housing hundreds of men over 45, some with mental illnesses.

City officials said that a new entry point was being sought and that the decision to close the shelter, which is in need of expensive repairs, is independent of a private developer's proposal to establish an upscale assisted living residence for the elderly there.

Most of the 400 beds in the new shelter will be used for men undergoing assessment for the first several weeks after their entry into the emergency shelter system, in dormitory units of 8 to 15 beds, Mr. McDonald said. He said development costs would total $21.1 million, and operation would cost about $51 a day per bed.

Gloria Nussbaum, spokeswoman for a coalition that includes 28 nonprofit providers of shelters for single adults, said the lack of information provided by the city about the project left many unanswered questions. Among them, she said, was why The Doe Fund, which currently does not run assessment programs for the city, was granted such a large contract when groups now doing such work were unaware of it. The assessment process is used to sort men for referral to other, smaller shelters with specialized services for problems like mental illness and drug abuse.

Susan Neibacher, executive director of Care for the Homeless, which operates an assessment shelter for women in the Kingsbridge armory in the Bronx, said she had tried to get a longer-term contract herself in past years, in order to secure bank financing to buy a better building for the program.

She said city officials told her then that the city could not grant any private group a contract longer than the typical three-year, renewable term.

Steven Banks, a lawyer for Legal Aid, said that regardless of the merits of The Doe Fund's programs, the accelerated process used to award the contract could not be justified under the city's procurement rules as an emergency.

"It's clearly a self-created emergency generated by an effort to close the Bellevue shelter to make way for a private real estate development," he said, and asked why the money to create a new shelter was not used instead for permanent housing or rental subsidies.