Thirteen of my neighbors and I have sued the City of New York over the planned homeless shelter at 225 25th Street in Greenwood Heights. We sued because the City refuses to treat us with fairness, transparency or basic respect.
We filed pro se because legal counsel was beyond the means of our working-class neighborhood. We had to file the lawsuit because every other channel had failed. The Mayor’s Office. The First Deputy Mayor. The Department of Social Services Commissioner. Thousands of petition signatures. Letters of support from our elected officials. We were treated by the City, not as citizens but as nuisances.
The warehouse-style shelter proposal at 225 25th St. is not a one-off. New York City established the Fair Share policy in 1989 because it understood that concentration produces harm. Our small neighborhood already hosts eleven homeless shelters in approximately a one-mile stretch, with more, including a federal prison; a methadone clinic; multiple power stations; the BQE; a concrete plant; and other facilities that most communities are not asked to absorb. We are not refusing our share. This neighborhood has carried it over many times.
We are asking the court to order what the City already requires. Fair Share rules say no neighborhood carries more than its portion. The City reads the rule backward. Our eleven existing shelters became the reason we can take a twelfth. Under that logic, the most burdened working-class neighborhoods will always be first in line for more.
I am an immigrant, an artist, a sociologist, and a professor at SUNY Purchase. I moved to this country in 2000 and have been politically engaged since my student years in Ankara. Anti-war protests, Occupy Wall Street, Gezi NYC. My academic work focuses on borders, state violence, displacement, and extractive capitalism.
When I moved to Greenwood Heights, the community was immediately welcoming. But the conditions of unhoused people in the shelters already concentrated here were impossible to ignore. Many living in hotel shelters are pushed out during the day and left with nowhere to go. The structural failure of this country is visible on our streets every day.
When a well-known shelter developer purchased a nearby industrial building, I began studying the shelter system closely. Of course, we need more housing and more support for the unhoused. But congregate shelters are appropriate neither for the people living in them nor for the neighborhoods forced to absorb them. I have already spoken with residents of the shelters in our neighborhood. Shelter residents describe what the research confirms. No privacy, no rest, and doors that push you out at dawn. A locked door stabilizes a life. A row of cots unravels it.
The more I learned, the more disturbed I became. The process is steered by a handful of shelter developers. DSS officials are opaque and dismissive. In working-class neighborhoods like Harlem, Chinatown, parts of the Bronx and Queens, and now ours, the City behaves as if the decision has already been made.
Over the past decade, New York City has spent roughly $25 billion on homeless services. Even at a conservative cost per unit, that money could have built tens of thousands of permanent apartments. Instead, the shelter population has grown, conditions have worsened, and a permanent class of contractors has been enriched by the crisis. By any reasonable measure, this is a colossal failure.
Through my academic and artistic work, I have studied how the state manages social insecurity through containment. Wars, climate change, natural disasters, and displacement produce vulnerable populations. The neoliberal state then folds that vulnerability into privatized systems of management and profit. As Loïc Wacquant argued in Punishing the Poor, the neoliberal state does not simply withdraw from welfare. It reorganizes punishment, surveillance, and abandonment as forms of governance.
Homeless shelters, ICE detention centers, refugee camps, and private prisons are not identical. But they belong to the same political logic: an archipelago of privatized containment. Public money flows into private or quasi-private systems. Trauma is produced by a failed welfare state, then managed, extracted, and turned into a revenue stream.
When it comes to what many now call the homeless-industrial complex, the language is humanitarian. The structure is not. Developers, contractors, nonprofit operators, consultants, and city agencies form a self-reinforcing system. The public pays enormous sums per person each year, while vulnerable people are warehoused in subpar facilities with little privacy or dignity. Working-class neighborhoods are told to absorb the consequences. Anyone who objects is accused of lacking compassion.
I reject that framing. I support a strong welfare state and fair taxes. I support shelter and housing. I support public solutions to public problems: public housing, public health, public education, and real social care. I do not support a privatized shelter system that enriches politically connected developers while failing both the unhoused and the communities where these facilities are imposed.
Perhaps we should call it performative dumbness. The DSS bureaucrats appear well-trained and compassionate. The problem is not their capability, education, or experience. And yet, again and again, they act as if their hands are tied. Responsibility is diffused. No one knows what is going on. Decisions disappear into the process. Strategic oversight is offloaded to contractors and consultants, who dictate what needs to be done. The answer to the public is always no, while the machinery of the deal moves forward.
That is why we sued the City.
We did not sue because we oppose shelter. We sued because the process is unjust. We sued because our neighborhood has already been asked to carry far more than its share. We sued because the City has refused to answer basic questions. We sued because working-class communities should not be sacrificed to a failed model of social service delivery.
The accusation of NIMBYism is lazy and dishonest. So is the question, where should all the homeless go. Both exist to shut down structural critique and to make anyone who asks about public money look heartless. People should be in permanent housing, funded by the money already moving through this system.
The contract shows how that money moves. The City will pay the shelter operator up to $60.6 million through 2030, with an option to extend to 2034. That comes to roughly $70,000 per bed, per year, for a cot in a warehouse. An apartment costs less. The operator's chief executive earns more than half a million dollars a year. The math is not a mistake. It is the business model.
The issue is a system nobody can trust. The City's own investigators examined 51 shelter providers and found problems at every one. This spring, federal prosecutors indicted the leaders of an operator holding nearly $200 million in city contracts. The City has not canceled its next contract with them. This is the system that now tells our neighborhood to accept a Fair Share analysis that counts wrong and an environmental review that contradicts itself. Why would we?
Structural problems require structural solutions. DSS, in its current form, cannot provide them. The agency and its managerial class need to be investigated, challenged, and fundamentally reformed.
This lawsuit is not only about one building. It is about the kind of city we are becoming.
Hakan Topal is a Greenwood Heights resident.
