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Despite the West 58th Street Coalition's costly and dehumanizing campaign to prevent the Park Savoy Hotel from opening its doors as a homeless shelter, New York City prevailed. (Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr/cc)
Wealthy Spent Over $300K in Failed Bid to Stop Manhattan Hotel From Housing Homeless
"One must ask who would have benefited from the Park Savoy shelter if it hadn't been stalled for this many years," one advocate said of the converted hotel, which was supposed to open in 2018.
Dec 10, 2021
After dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a hostile anti-homeless campaign, wealthy residents in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City have officially lost their legal battle to prevent the opening of a local hotel that has been converted into a rapid re-housing program.
"Nestled in between a 24-hour parking structure and an apartment building on a predominantly residential street" near Central Park, the Park Savoy Hotel "blends in with the other hotels in the neighborhood," The Guardian reported Friday. The key difference is that its occupants are unhoused workers--not the business travelers or tourists preferred by many rich people living on so-called Billionaires Row, a nearby cluster of recently built luxury high-rises.
The shelter, which "quietly opened its doors in early November," the newspaper noted, "is designed to house up to 80 men and is known as an 'employment shelter' meant for those who are seeking employment or who are actively employed, especially in midtown Manhattan."
For over three years, its opening was delayed by wealthy opponents, who spent more than $300,000 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop it--"the longest and the most-well-funded litigation" against any shelter in New York City history, according to Steve Banks, commissioner for the city's Department of Homeless Services.
In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a new initiative to address homelessness in New York City, where nearly 123,000 different individuals used the municipal shelter system in fiscal year 2020. His initiative included plans to open roughly 90 new shelters to accommodate the United States' largest population of unhoused people.
"They'll be in every kind of neighborhood," de Blasio said at the time.
According to The Guardian:
The Park Savoy shelter was slated to open in spring 2018, but the city entered a lengthy legal battle with residents and business owners in the area who vehemently opposed the shelter and formed a group, called the West 58th Street Coalition, to block it.
An online petition created in 2018 against the hotel, calling it a threat with "an enormous impact on our densely populated, narrow, high pedestrian-traffic street," garnered nearly 3,500 signatures. Members of the coalition argued that the city did not receive community input when starting plans to open the shelter and called the building "a dangerous fire trap."
[...]
Determined to stop the shelter, the West 58th Street Coalition filed lawsuit in 2018 that argued the building was too "unsafe" for occupants and that "crime and loitering" caused by the shelter would lead to "irreparable injuries." The coalition also spent at least $287,000 toward lobbyists advocating against the shelter, according to nonprofit news site The City. They spent another $100,000 on billboards in Iowa meant to prod de Blasio during his brief run for president in 2020.
Despite the West 58th Street Coalition's costly and dehumanizing effort to kill the Park Savoy shelter, a state appellate court in May gave the city final approval to open it.
Jacquelyn Simone, policy director at the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, argued that the court's ruling demonstrates that cities can overcome lawsuits seeking to shut down shelters.
"One must ask who would have benefited from the Park Savoy shelter if it hadn't been stalled for this many years," she told The Guardian.
Simone added that opponents of housing support programs typically have "a lot of fears and anxiety that don't actually materialize once the shelters open."
Last month, Catherine Trapani, executive director of the advocacy group Homeless Services United, told The City that "of course we want permanent housing solutions, and we're going to continue to work towards that, but in the meantime, these guys need a place to go."
Trapani said that she is glad the Park Savoy Hotel "will get to be used by people who need it." She pointed out "how shameful it is" that the West 58th Street building went unused for several years.
"We went through an entire pandemic, and record-high [numbers] of single adults in the shelter system," she added, "and this sat empty."
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Kenny Stancil
Kenny Stancil is senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project and a former staff writer for Common Dreams.
After dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a hostile anti-homeless campaign, wealthy residents in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City have officially lost their legal battle to prevent the opening of a local hotel that has been converted into a rapid re-housing program.
"Nestled in between a 24-hour parking structure and an apartment building on a predominantly residential street" near Central Park, the Park Savoy Hotel "blends in with the other hotels in the neighborhood," The Guardian reported Friday. The key difference is that its occupants are unhoused workers--not the business travelers or tourists preferred by many rich people living on so-called Billionaires Row, a nearby cluster of recently built luxury high-rises.
The shelter, which "quietly opened its doors in early November," the newspaper noted, "is designed to house up to 80 men and is known as an 'employment shelter' meant for those who are seeking employment or who are actively employed, especially in midtown Manhattan."
For over three years, its opening was delayed by wealthy opponents, who spent more than $300,000 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop it--"the longest and the most-well-funded litigation" against any shelter in New York City history, according to Steve Banks, commissioner for the city's Department of Homeless Services.
In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a new initiative to address homelessness in New York City, where nearly 123,000 different individuals used the municipal shelter system in fiscal year 2020. His initiative included plans to open roughly 90 new shelters to accommodate the United States' largest population of unhoused people.
"They'll be in every kind of neighborhood," de Blasio said at the time.
According to The Guardian:
The Park Savoy shelter was slated to open in spring 2018, but the city entered a lengthy legal battle with residents and business owners in the area who vehemently opposed the shelter and formed a group, called the West 58th Street Coalition, to block it.
An online petition created in 2018 against the hotel, calling it a threat with "an enormous impact on our densely populated, narrow, high pedestrian-traffic street," garnered nearly 3,500 signatures. Members of the coalition argued that the city did not receive community input when starting plans to open the shelter and called the building "a dangerous fire trap."
[...]
Determined to stop the shelter, the West 58th Street Coalition filed lawsuit in 2018 that argued the building was too "unsafe" for occupants and that "crime and loitering" caused by the shelter would lead to "irreparable injuries." The coalition also spent at least $287,000 toward lobbyists advocating against the shelter, according to nonprofit news site The City. They spent another $100,000 on billboards in Iowa meant to prod de Blasio during his brief run for president in 2020.
Despite the West 58th Street Coalition's costly and dehumanizing effort to kill the Park Savoy shelter, a state appellate court in May gave the city final approval to open it.
Jacquelyn Simone, policy director at the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, argued that the court's ruling demonstrates that cities can overcome lawsuits seeking to shut down shelters.
"One must ask who would have benefited from the Park Savoy shelter if it hadn't been stalled for this many years," she told The Guardian.
Simone added that opponents of housing support programs typically have "a lot of fears and anxiety that don't actually materialize once the shelters open."
Last month, Catherine Trapani, executive director of the advocacy group Homeless Services United, told The City that "of course we want permanent housing solutions, and we're going to continue to work towards that, but in the meantime, these guys need a place to go."
Trapani said that she is glad the Park Savoy Hotel "will get to be used by people who need it." She pointed out "how shameful it is" that the West 58th Street building went unused for several years.
"We went through an entire pandemic, and record-high [numbers] of single adults in the shelter system," she added, "and this sat empty."
Kenny Stancil
Kenny Stancil is senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project and a former staff writer for Common Dreams.
After dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into a hostile anti-homeless campaign, wealthy residents in one of the most expensive neighborhoods in New York City have officially lost their legal battle to prevent the opening of a local hotel that has been converted into a rapid re-housing program.
"Nestled in between a 24-hour parking structure and an apartment building on a predominantly residential street" near Central Park, the Park Savoy Hotel "blends in with the other hotels in the neighborhood," The Guardian reported Friday. The key difference is that its occupants are unhoused workers--not the business travelers or tourists preferred by many rich people living on so-called Billionaires Row, a nearby cluster of recently built luxury high-rises.
The shelter, which "quietly opened its doors in early November," the newspaper noted, "is designed to house up to 80 men and is known as an 'employment shelter' meant for those who are seeking employment or who are actively employed, especially in midtown Manhattan."
For over three years, its opening was delayed by wealthy opponents, who spent more than $300,000 in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to stop it--"the longest and the most-well-funded litigation" against any shelter in New York City history, according to Steve Banks, commissioner for the city's Department of Homeless Services.
In 2017, Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a new initiative to address homelessness in New York City, where nearly 123,000 different individuals used the municipal shelter system in fiscal year 2020. His initiative included plans to open roughly 90 new shelters to accommodate the United States' largest population of unhoused people.
"They'll be in every kind of neighborhood," de Blasio said at the time.
According to The Guardian:
The Park Savoy shelter was slated to open in spring 2018, but the city entered a lengthy legal battle with residents and business owners in the area who vehemently opposed the shelter and formed a group, called the West 58th Street Coalition, to block it.
An online petition created in 2018 against the hotel, calling it a threat with "an enormous impact on our densely populated, narrow, high pedestrian-traffic street," garnered nearly 3,500 signatures. Members of the coalition argued that the city did not receive community input when starting plans to open the shelter and called the building "a dangerous fire trap."
[...]
Determined to stop the shelter, the West 58th Street Coalition filed lawsuit in 2018 that argued the building was too "unsafe" for occupants and that "crime and loitering" caused by the shelter would lead to "irreparable injuries." The coalition also spent at least $287,000 toward lobbyists advocating against the shelter, according to nonprofit news site The City. They spent another $100,000 on billboards in Iowa meant to prod de Blasio during his brief run for president in 2020.
Despite the West 58th Street Coalition's costly and dehumanizing effort to kill the Park Savoy shelter, a state appellate court in May gave the city final approval to open it.
Jacquelyn Simone, policy director at the advocacy group Coalition for the Homeless, argued that the court's ruling demonstrates that cities can overcome lawsuits seeking to shut down shelters.
"One must ask who would have benefited from the Park Savoy shelter if it hadn't been stalled for this many years," she told The Guardian.
Simone added that opponents of housing support programs typically have "a lot of fears and anxiety that don't actually materialize once the shelters open."
Last month, Catherine Trapani, executive director of the advocacy group Homeless Services United, told The City that "of course we want permanent housing solutions, and we're going to continue to work towards that, but in the meantime, these guys need a place to go."
Trapani said that she is glad the Park Savoy Hotel "will get to be used by people who need it." She pointed out "how shameful it is" that the West 58th Street building went unused for several years.
"We went through an entire pandemic, and record-high [numbers] of single adults in the shelter system," she added, "and this sat empty."
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LATEST NEWS
'Go Home Fascists': Protesters Jeer Federal Agents in Streets of DC
Demonstrators yelled at federal agents to "get off our streets" as they set up a police checkpoint on a popular street in the nation's capital.
Aug 14, 2025
More than 100 protesters gathered late Wednesday at a checkpoint set up by a combination of local and federal officers on a popular street in Washington, D.C., where U.S. President Donald Trump has taken over the police force and deployed around 800 National Guard members as part of what he hopes will be a long-term occupation of the country's capital—and potentially other major cities.
The officers at the Wednesday night checkpoint reportedly included agents from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which is also taking part in immigration raids in the city. Some agents were wearing face coverings to conceal their identities.
After law enforcement agents established the checkpoint on 14th Street, protesters gathered and jeered the officers, chanting "get off our streets" and "go home fascists." Some demonstrators yelled at the agents standing at the checkpoint, while others warned oncoming drivers to turn to avoid the police installation.
There was no officially stated purpose for the checkpoint, but it came amid the Trump administration's lawless mass deportation campaign and its broader threats to deploy U.S. troops on the streets of American cities to crush dissent.
At least one person, a Black woman, was arrested at Wednesday's checkpoint. One D.C. resident posted to Reddit that agents were "pulling people out of cars who are 'suspicious' or if they don't like the answers to their questions." The Washington Post reported that a "mix of local and federal authorities pulled over drivers for seat belt violations or broken taillights."
The National Guard troops activated by Trump this week were not seen at the checkpoint, which shut down before midnight.
Wednesday night's protests are expected to be just the start as public anger mounts over Trump's authoritarian actions in the nation's capital—where violent crime fell to a 30-year low last year—and across the country.
Radley Balko, a journalist who has documented the growing militarization of U.S. police, wrote earlier this week that "the motivation for Donald Trump's plan to 'federalize' Washington, D.C., is same as his motivation for sending active-duty troops into Los Angeles, deporting people to the CECOT torture prison in El Salvador, his politicization of the Department of Justice, and nearly every other authoritarian overreach of the last six months: He is testing the limits of his power—and, by extension, of our democracy."
"He's feeling out what the Supreme Court, Congress, and the public will let him get away with. And so far, he's been able to do what he pleases," Balko wrote. "We are now past the point of crisis. Trump has long dreamed of presiding over a police state. He has openly admired and been reluctant to criticize foreign leaders who helm one. He has now appointed people who have expressed their willingness to help him achieve one to the very positions with the power to make one happen. And both he and his highest-ranking advisers have both openly spoken about and written out their plans to implement one."
"It's time to believe them," Balko added.
Trump White House Says Military Occupation of Nation's Capital Set to Expand
One critic accused the president of "testing the limits of his power, hoping to intimidate other cities into submission to his every vengeful whim."
Aug 13, 2025
The Trump administration's military occupation of Washington, D.C. is expected to expand, a White House official said Wednesday, with President Donald Trump also saying he will ask Congress to approve a "long-term" extension of federal control over local police in the nation's capital.
The unnamed Trump official told CNN that a "significantly higher" number of National Guard troops are expected on the ground in Washington later Wednesday to support law enforcement patrols in the city.
"The National Guard is not arresting people," the official said, adding that troops are tasked with creating "a safe environment" for the hundreds of federal officers and agents from over a dozen agencies who are fanning out across the city over the strong objection of local officials.
Trump dubiously declared a public safety emergency Monday in order to take control of Washington police under Section 740 of the District of Columbia Self-Government and Governmental Reorganization Act. The president said Wednesday that he would ask the Republican-controlled Congress to authorize an extension of his federal takeover of local police beyond the 30 days allowed under Section 740.
"Already they're saying, 'He's a dictator,'" Trump said of his critics during remarks at the Kennedy Center in Washington. "The place is going to hell. We've got to stop it. So instead of saying, 'He's a dictator,' they should say, 'We're going to join him and make Washington safe.'"
According to official statistics, violent crime in Washington is down 26% from a year ago, when it was at its second-lowest level since 1966,
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) have both expressed support for Trump's actions. However, any legislation authorizing an extension of federal control over local police would face an uphill battle in the Senate, where Democratic lawmakers can employ procedural rules to block the majority's effort.
Trump also said any congressional authorization could open the door to targeting other cities in his crosshairs, including Baltimore, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, and Oakland. Official statistics show violent crime trending downward in all of those cities—with some registering historically low levels.
While some critics have called Trump's actions in Washington a distraction from his administration's mishandling of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, others say his occupation of the nation's capital is a test case to see what he can get away with in other cities.
Kat Abughazaleh, a Democratic candidate for Congress in Illinois, said Monday that the president's D.C. takeover "is another telltale sign of his authoritarian ambitions."
Some opponents also said Trump's actions are intended to intimidate Democrat-controlled cities, pointing to his June order to deploy thousands of National Guard troops to Los Angeles in response to protests against his administration's mass deportation campaign.
Testifying Wednesday at a San Francisco trial to determine whether Trump violated the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878—which generally prohibits use of the military for domestic law enforcement—by sending troops to Los Angeles, California Deputy Attorney General Meghan Strong argued that the president wanted to "strike fear into the hearts of Californians."
Roosevelt University political science professor and Newsweek contributor David Faris wrote Wednesday that "deploying the National Guard to Washington, D.C. is an unconscionable abuse of federal power and another worrisome signpost on our road to autocracy."
"Using the military to bring big, blue cities to heel, exactly as 'alarmists' predicted during the 2024 campaign, isn't about a crisis in D.C.—violent crime is actually at a 30-year low," he added. "President Trump is, once again, testing the limits of his power, hoping to intimidate other cities into submission to his every vengeful whim by making the once unimaginable—an American tyrant ordering a military occupation of our own capital—a terrifying reality."
Report Warns of Anti-Family Pronatalist Movement's Growing Influence on Trump White House
"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said one advocate.
Aug 13, 2025
The Trump administration's push for Americans to have more children has been well documented, from Vice President JD Vance's insults aimed at "childless cat ladies" to officials' meetings with "pronatalist" advocates who want to boost U.S. birth rates, which have been declining since 2007.
But a report released by the National Women's Law Center (NWLC) on Wednesday details how the methods the White House have reportedly considered to convince Americans to procreate moremay be described by the far right as "pro-family," but are actually being pushed by a eugenicist, misogynist movement that has little interest in making it any easier to raise a family in the United States.
The proposals include bestowing a "National Medal of Motherhood" on women who have more than six children, giving a $5,000 "baby bonus" to new parents, and prioritizing federal projects in areas with high birth rates.
"Underneath shiny motherhood medals and promises of baby bonuses is a movement intent on elevating white supremacist ideology and forcing women out of the workplace," said Emily Martin, chief program officer of the National Women's Law Center.
The report describes how "Silicon Valley tech elites" and traditional conservatives who oppose abortion rights and even a woman's right to work outside the home have converged to push for "preserving the traditional family structure while encouraging women to have a lot of children."
With pronatalists often referring to "declining genetic quality" in the U.S. and promoting the idea that Americans must produce "good quality children," in the words of evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman, the pronatalist movement "is built on racist, sexist, and anti-immigrant ideologies."
If conservatives are concerned about population loss in the U.S., the report points out, they would "make it easier for immigrants to come to the United States to live and work. More immigrants mean more workers, which would address some of the economic concerns raised by declining birth rates."
But pronatalists "only want to see certain populations increase (i.e., white people), and there are many immigrants who don't fit into that narrow qualification."
The report, titled "Baby Bonuses and Motherhood Medals: Why We Shouldn't Trust the Pronatalist Movement," describes how President Donald Trump has enlisted a "pronatalist army" that's been instrumental both in pushing a virulently anti-immigrant, mass deportation agenda and in demanding that more straight couples should marry and have children, as the right-wing policy playbook Project 2025 demands.
Trump's former adviser and benefactor, billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk, has spoken frequently about the need to prevent a collapse of U.S. society and civilization by raising birth rates, and has pushed misinformation fearmongering about birth control.
Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy proposed rewarding areas with high birth rates by prioritizing infrastructure projects, and like Vance has lobbed insults at single women while also deriding the use of contraception.
The report was released days after CNN detailed the close ties the Trump administration has with self-described Christian nationalist pastor Doug Wilson, who heads the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches, preaches that women should not vote, and suggested in an interview with correspondent Pamela Brown that women's primary function is birthing children, saying they are "the kind of people that people come out of."
Wilson has ties to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, whose children attend schools founded by the pastor and who shared the video online with the tagline of Wilson's church, "All of Christ for All of Life."
But the NWLC noted, no amount of haranguing women over their relationship status, plans for childbearing, or insistence that they are primarily meant to stay at home with "four or five children," as Wilson said, can reverse the impact the Trump administration's policies have had on families.
"While the Trump administration claims to be pursuing a pro-baby agenda, their actions tell a different story," the report notes. "Rather than advancing policies that would actually support families—like lowering costs, expanding access to housing and food, or investing in child care—they've prioritized dismantling basic need supports, rolling back longstanding civil rights protections, and ripping away people's bodily autonomy."
The report was published weeks after Trump signed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act into law—making pregnancy more expensive and more dangerous for millions of low-income women by slashing Medicaid funding and "endangering the 42 million women and children" who rely on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program for their daily meals.
While demanding that women have more children, said the NWLC, Trump has pushed an "anti-women, anti-family agenda."
Martin said that unlike the pronatalist movement, "a real pro-family agenda would include protecting reproductive healthcare, investing in childcare as a public good, promoting workplace policies that enable parents to succeed, and ensuring that all children have the resources that they need to thrive not just at birth, but throughout their lives."
"The administration's deep hostility toward these pro-family policies," said Martin, "tells you all that you need to know about pronatalists' true motives.”
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