NYC is planning to build 2 200-bed homeless shelters for single men on either side of Westchester Square in the Bronx on the very border of Bronx Community Board 10: on Blondell Avenue and on Poplar Street.

The Blondell Avenue site will cost the city (read, taxpayers) $443,000,000 because it is a heavily contaminated site, having been an auto junkyard for decades; it is contaminated with heavy metals and the groundwater is contaminated with PCBs and other pollutants. A report has already been done for a proposed affordable housing site right next door, and the shelter site would be even worse.

On Poplar Street, the shelter will be a few yards from the Bronx Easter Seals Child Development Center's playground, which faces the site and is for elementary-school aged children.

In both cases the shelters will be in locations already saturated with social service agencies and very close to other homeless shelters (and each other), and is more than the area's fair share by far! Also, these are very poor locations because of the contamination in one site, and very close proximity to elementary school aged children in the other.

We ask DHS to stop the Blondell shelter and that the Poplar site be either stopped or the population changed to a family shelter.

Please sign our petition and write to councilwoman Marjorie Velazquez. Thank you! And please share far and wide!