{"id":367703,"date":"2026-10-08T09:46:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-08T09:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/367703\/"},"modified":"2026-10-08T09:46:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-08T09:46:12","slug":"nycs-shelters-should-be-dignified","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/367703\/","title":{"rendered":"NYC’s shelters should be dignified"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 300 men sleep each night in cavernous dormitories lined with rows of metal beds at Schwartz Men\u2019s Shelter on Wards Island<\/a>. Water drips through a leaky roof. Noise echoes across rooms that offer little privacy.<\/p>\n

Living conditions like these are why many homeless New Yorkers avoid the shelter system. For someone experiencing homelessness, these conditions can make an already difficult moment much harder. They can reinforce feelings of danger, stress, and instability, rather than create an environment where people can focus on themselves and their goals.<\/p>\n

As an organization that operates shelters, we know that it doesn\u2019t have to be this way. At one of our domestic violence shelters, broken metal blinds and bright overhead lighting created a harsh environment for families. We replaced them with safer blinds and dimmable lamps, and families told us the space felt more peaceful and private. At our family shelter in Bushwick, privately funded improvements to a rec room made the space safer, warmer, and more functional for children. Changes like these make a real difference for residents.<\/p>\n

The problem is that making even simple repairs is slow, costly, or impossible.\u00a0Many shelters are operated by nonprofit organizations but owned by the city or private entities, limiting the nonprofit\u2019s ability to make needed improvements.<\/p>\n

City rules prohibit nonprofit providers from saving or rolling over annual contract funds for larger, long-term renovations. Instead, the city must decide whether to front the costs, which are outside the annual operating budget, often resulting in temporary fixes rather than lasting ones that would save money over time. Even when providers have private resources for small repairs, they face lengthy city approval processes, meaning some critical improvements take years to address.<\/p>\n

Volunteers of America-Greater New York\u2019s new report, \u201cRestoring Dignity<\/a>,\u201d draws on our own work at Schwartz and other shelters for single adults and families to show how these barriers play out in practice and what it would take to remove them. People stay in shelters an average of 372 days for single adults and 415 days for families with children. Over that much time, the report finds, a building shapes the wellbeing, feelings, and forward momentum of the people living in it.<\/p>\n

Schwartz shows what happens when a building is asked to do a job it was never designed to do. Built as a summer training facility in the 1930s, it now shelters hundreds of men year-round. After assessing conditions, we developed plans to add privacy between beds, reduce noise, make common areas more welcoming, and replace institutional features that worsen stress. The city has begun working with us on an initial phase.<\/p>\n

But Schwartz also shows why progress can take so long. We provide services at the shelter, but we don\u2019t own the building. When a window leaks or another major problem emerges, we can\u2019t simply fix it. What should be a straightforward repair becomes a long process involving multiple agencies, temporary patches, and repeated delays.<\/p>\n

New York City must assess the infrastructure needs of every shelter, as we did at Schwartz, and develop a capital plan to bring them up to a real standard of quality: quieter places to sleep, private spaces to decompress, furniture that doesn\u2019t feel institutional, choice over things like lighting, and places for children to play or do homework. It should also create a dedicated renovation and preservation fund so operators can move beyond one-off repairs to lasting improvements.<\/p>\n

By investing in the spaces where unhoused New Yorkers seek safety, the city can better meet their physical and emotional needs and ensure every shelter supports their path toward stability and independence.<\/p>\n

Ginsburg is the president and CEO of Volunteers of America-Greater New York<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 300 men sleep each night in cavernous dormitories lined with rows of metal beds at Schwartz…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":367704,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[9,56,63,65,64,299],"class_list":["post-367703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-new-york","tag-ny","tag-nyc","tag-nyc-headlines","tag-nyc-news","tag-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=367703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/367703\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/367704"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=367703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=367703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=367703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}