Nov 13, 2007 7:48 pm US/Eastern
City To Send More Mentally Ill To Upper West Side
Residents Says Anger Is Not Case Of 'Not-In-My-Backyard'
NEW YORK (CBS) ―
A fight over safety is brewing on the Upper West Side.
CBS 2 HD has learned the city plans to move dozens of mentally ill patients into one neighborhood … with little supervision. The neighborhood in question already houses the highest amount of the city's mental patients.
Residents of one Upper West Side neighborhood say they're shouldering more than their fair share of supportive housing for the mentally ill, recovering drug abusers and other troubled individuals.
The West 90s are quiet, tree-lined blocks, with strollers everywhere you look, and schools or daycares on almost every block. The crime rate here is low, but residents fear that will soon change.
"They're bringing in a very large and troubled population to a very family oriented neighborhood," resident Kathy Passero said. "It's going to be very minimally staffed, particularly in the evenings and on the weekends."
Passero has lived on 94th Street for 11 years. She says the conversion of the St. Louis building to supportive housing for mentally ill and recovering drug abusers is a mistake.
"This is going to be a population that isn't going to get the support that they need, and that's going to spend a lot of time sort of out on the streets," Passero said.
Nine-hundred people signed a petition to stop the project, including Aaron Biller.
"It's not that we shouldn't have these facilities, it's that in concentrating them into a small area, you are destabilizing the life of a neighborhood," Biller said.
It would be easy to write off their concerns as just another case of not-in-my-backyard, except that the Upper West Side has 10 times as many people staying in supportive housing, including mentally ill patients, than the Upper East Side, Downtown and Midtown, which the residents here say is a clear violation of the city charter.
The charter's fair share statute says supportive housing facilities, like these within blocks of the St. Louis, must be spread out across the city.
But as the pushpins on a map show the Upper West Side has the vast majority.
City Councilperson Gale Brewer says it's a matter of available real estate.
When asked why there is such a disparity, Brewer said, "I think probably because the buildings on the Upper West Side are residential hotels. On the East Side, to the best of my knowledge, it's mostly apartment buildings. And for whatever reason we've had a history of these large residential hotels."
Hotels that are easily converted into supportive housing, but people here say that still doesn't make it right.
"I walk my daughter down that street every morning to kindergarten, and I'm worried about her safety, my safety," Passero said.
Residents of the neighborhood plan to file a lawsuit to stop the project.
If completed, the St. Louis will be the most expensive supportive housing project, per square foot, in the city's history.
(© MMX, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.)
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