September 24, 2026 - Brooklyn Downtown Star

North Brooklynites Rally for Senior Housing at Former Greenpoint Hospital

BQE Admin on September 24, 2026

(Photos by Cole Sinanian).

For months, the City has used the site of a long-planned senior housing project as a temporary homeless shelter. Greenpoint’s older adults say it’s gone on long enough.

BY COLE SINANIAN | cole@queensledger.com

Debra Bender is among the presumably shrinking crowd of Brooklynites to have given birth in the Greenpoint Hospital.

She had her oldest son there, before the long-dilapidated facility closed in 1982. Now, more than 40 years later, the 61-year resident of the nearby Cooper Park Houses is fighting to secure the former hospital’s future as a 557-unit affordable housing hub.

On Thursday, September 17, Bender and about two dozen North Brooklynites gathered outside the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) headquarters in the Financial District to demand that the agency vacate the Greenpoint Hospital site to make way for the long-planned housing development. Back in 2021, the City approved plans from the local organization St Nicks Alliance and developer Hudson Companies to rebuild the site as a sprawling complex dubbed the Kingsland Commons— a four-phase project that, once complete, will count deeply affordable housing, supportive housing for local seniors, and a 200-bed men’s homeless shelter run by Project Renewal, a nonprofit.

The first two phases are nearly complete; the shelter opened last year, and the lottery for the 311 units of 30-80 AMI affordable housing that make up the second phase is set to open in the coming weeks. But it’s the next phase — which involves the demolition of a portion of the Greenpoint Hospital to make way for 135 units of multifamily housing and 109 units of affordable senior housing — that is facing delays. When the Mamdani Administration abruptly closed the former men’s shelter at the old Bellevue Hospital on 30th St. in Manhattan in March, the City temporarily relocated 200 of its occupants to the Greenpoint Hospital site, preventing the developers from breaking ground on the senior housing.

Speaking to the Brooklyn Star, Bender was clear that she and her neighbors are not against homeless shelters — the neighborhood already has one. It’s the City’s lack of communication with the community, and the fact that the temporary shelter is blocking the much-needed and long-promised senior housing, that Bender and her neighbors are protesting.

“We have nothing against people being homeless because we are one step away from being homeless ourselves,” Bender said. “We want affordable housing. We need affordable housing, especially for our seniors.”

The intake shelter at Greenpoint Hospital was always meant to be temporary, a DHS spokesperson said, and joins several locations throughout the city that are temporarily hosting the men once housed at Bellevue. And with the hospital site having been used as a Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter in the past, it was a natural choice, the spokesperson added.

“Following the closure of the 30th Street Intake Shelter, DHS had to address an urgent need for assessment beds so we could continue to connect New Yorkers to appropriate shelter placements,” the DHS spokesperson wrote in a statement to the Brooklyn Star.

“As such, we utilized every resource at our disposal – including sites that previously served as DHS facilities and remained under our control – to meet this operational need.”

The spokesperson did not say how long DHS planned to keep the men at Kingsland Commons.

Cooper Park houses resident Debra Bender at Thursday’s rally.

Others at Thursday’s rally characterized the relocation as a betrayal on the City’s part. It was only after Bellevue’s closure, when a St Nicks Alliance staffer read about the City’s plans to move into the Kingsland Commons site in a news article, that the community learned of DHS’ plans.

”They did not engage us in any of these conversations,” said William Vega, who sits on Brooklyn’s Community Board 1, on Thursday. ”The promises that they made to the community, they broke.”

About 30 minutes into the rally, a group of protesters organized with St Nicks Alliance — led by the organization’s Deputy Director of Community Preservation Rolando Guzman — broke off to hand-deliver a letter to the office of Department of Social Services Commissioner Erin Dalton, 17 stories above.

State Senator Julia Salazar showed up shortly before to address the crowd, taking care not to alienate the DHS workers in the building.

“I deeply appreciate the work that the public servants at DHS do, and they deserve and should have a more suitable location to do intake to serve constituents who are currently experiencing homelessness,” Salazar said.

She continued: “It’s not appropriate for them to endlessly use this site for that purpose, especially because it further delays this extremely important project that will benefit all of our communities.”

It’s this last point that seemed to draw the most ire from community members Thursday. Much of the new housing going up in North Brooklyn is either luxury housing or affordable housing for single adults, meaning many of the area’s seniors are either forced into cramped arrangements with their younger family members, or leave the neighborhood entirely.

“In their last chapter, what are they doing?” said Vega. “They’re sharing the bedroom with their grandchildren, having to travel to have their own apartment in the last chapter of life.”

St. Nicks Alliance, which has provided elder care services in North Brooklyn since the 1980s, has several affordable housing projects for seniors in development around Greenpoint and Williamsburg. According to St Nicks Alliance Director of Affordable Housing Policy and Advocacy Frank Lang, these developments already have long waitlists.

“We’re constantly getting people requesting to add on to the list, so there really is not enough housing,” Lang told the Brooklyn Star at Thursday’s rally. “That’s the population that’s lived in the community for generations that’s getting priced out. They can’t stay in the community.”

Bender, who lives with her 37-year-old, wheelchair-bound son, says she’s witnessed this displacement first-hand in her elderly mother, who moved out of Greenpoint years ago and now hardly recognizes the neighborhood she once called home. Without the seniors who remember how things were, Bender said, the neighborhood will lose its collective memory.

“We’ve seen a lot of change.” she said. “My mom, when she visits, she feels like a tourist here. Sometimes I feel like a tourist here as well.”

SCHWARTZ: I Almost Got Scammed: A Cautionary Tale

BQE Admin on September 24, 2026

scam alert warning background to keep you save from online scam vector

BY LANA SCHWARTZ | lana.schwartz925@gmail.com

Saturday morning did not get off to a good start for me. For anyone squeamish among you reading this, please forgive me for the next sentence. My cat threw up in my bed. His eyes were bigger than his little cat stomach and he got too excited, ate too fast. It happens to the best of us. My cat, who is currently wearing a cone because of an ear infection that will not go away, got some throw up in his cone. Figuring out my exact order of operations was difficult. I had to clean up my bed, clean up my cat, take off his cone, and because, right now, if he has an ear he’s going to scratch it, put a different cone on him.

It was not a pretty scene, for many reasons, not all of which had to do with the throw up. Eventually, though, I got things settled. I threw my bedding in a bag to be taken to the dry cleaner. I got my cat into a soft cone (which he hated and did not hesitate to let me know) and then back into his plastic cone (which he does not like but seems to tolerate, like a relative you only see at holidays), when I got a call from TD Bank.

“Hello, is this Lana Schwartz speaking?” It was.

“Did you make a charge for $300 in Florida?” I had not.

“Did you make a withdrawal for $1,500 from an ATM in Florida?” I also had not done this.

My card had been skimmed, according to this caller from a number associated with TD Bank. Well, that’s exactly the sort of thing that would happen after the morning I had, I told myself.

He asked me some more questions, asked me to confirm some information. Halfway through our conversation, I walked into my bedroom and saw my cat had wriggled out of his cone.

“Are you still with me?” The TD Bank employee asked.

“I am, yes. There is just a lot going on right now,” I explained. “Can I speak to a supervisor?”

The TD Bank employee stressed the importance of me listening to him. He told me to open my TD Bank app, and pointed to the fact that it said they were “FDIC-Insured” as reason to believe everything would be credited back to my account.

He told me some numbers and asked me to put my debit card in an envelope, bring it outside to his supervisor, at which point it would be taken to an FDIC facility to be “unskimmed.”

As he gave me these instructions, I Googled “Can a scammer call you from the TD Bank phone number?” The answer, while unclear how or why, was yes.

It was at this point I reiterated my request to speak with a supervisor.

“Am I not doing a good job, Miss Lana?” The man, who I now understood not to be a TD Bank employee, wanted to know.

“Am I not doing a good job scamming you?” He might as well have been asking. Normally, I would’ve been even quicker on the uptake, but sometimes your cat throws up in your bed.

I could tell he was becoming increasingly agitated, desperate — two things TD Bank employees often are not, because the dollars and cents in your account may as well be Monopoly money to them. I imagine if you’re looking at numbers all day long, they begin to lose their significance, like leaves on various trees. In fact, the concern this “employee” had for alleged fraudulent activity on my account should’ve tipped me off in the first place. So I did what anyone has the free will to do, during any phone call: I hung up.

Immediately, I tried to call TD Bank, but since the number was the same as the one he was calling me from, the calls merged. I hung up again. TD Bank should really consider looking into this.

Eventually, I got through to TD Bank. I took care of my accounts how they needed to be. My bedding is still at the dry cleaners. My cat is in his cone.

While this event was exhausting and disconcerting, it is not without its takeaways: There is someone out there who believes I have enough money in my account to be worth stealing from.

Lana Schwartz is a writer who was born and raised in Queens and today lives in Brooklyn. Her writing has appeared on The New Yorker, The Onion, McSweeney’s, and more. She is the author of the books “Build Your Own Romantic Comedy” and “Set Piece.”

Mixed Reviews for Gowanus NYCHA Repairs

BQE Admin on September 24, 2026

(Photo: Jack Delaney)

BY JACK DELANEY | jdelaney@queensledger.com

GOWANUS — A $200 million renovation of two NYCHA complexes, originally promised in the 2021 rezoning of Gowanus, is finally proceeding. But while many tenants are relieved, some argue that the process has been unnecessarily disruptive — including one woman who says a contractor misplaced her mother’s ashes.

On Thursday, September 17, residents of Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens gathered in the auditorium of P.S. 133 for the latest meeting of the Gowanus Oversight Task Force, a largely volunteer-run body charged with ensuring that the community receives a laundry list of benefits that were attached to the rezoning.

At a meeting last August, attendees raised concerns that outreach to NYCHA tenants was falling short, and that the anticipated repairs seemed to have stalled indefinitely after a company, Mega/Technico Joint Venture, was selected to carry out the work in 2024. “We can’t keep going around in circles,” Monica Underwood, a co-founder of the Public Housing Civic Association, said at the time. “You have to find a way to reach people and bring them in, or else it’s going to be the same crap, over and over.

But more than a year later, the mood had shifted to cautious optimism. The first of the renovations’ eight phases began construction in February, focusing on modernizing kitchens and bathrooms and remediating lead. The project does not require residents to move to a different NYCHA campus — a major sticking point in discussions with local leaders — and some tenants noted that the company’s early roll-out of example apartments was reassuring.

“I have lived here long enough to see plans come and go, and residents are tired of hearing about what might happen someday,” Valerie Bell, president of the Wyckoff Gardens Resident Association, told The NYCHA Journal this spring. “When people walked into that model unit, they could finally see something real. It meant something. It showed respect for our time and our voices, and it showed that the work is finally moving.”

Yet as the renovations have progressed, not everything has gone smoothly. Katrina Gorham, who lives at Gowanus Houses, explained at the meeting that 100 boxes of her belongings are still missing after they were packed up this summer by a moving company, ZeroMax, hired by NYCHA to help tenants relocate while their apartments underwent repairs. Other residents raised issues with post-renovation leaks and mounds of dust left behind by workers.

“The solution will need to take into consideration that this is a pattern, and not just one resident experiencing an obstacle or challenge,” said Council Member Shahana Hanif, whose office sits directly across from Gowanus Houses. “We’ve already seen some changes, and we know that this partnership is very well capable of getting this right.”

Michelle Basic Moore, NYCHA’s vice president of comprehensive modernization, noted that unlike at other complexes where privatization is being pursued to fund repairs — a controversial program known as RAD/PACT — the renovations to Gowanus Houses and Wyckoff Gardens were reliant on the $200 million from the rezoning, along with a smattering of state funds for elevator upgrades.

“The city said they were not giving us any more money, many times,” said Basic Moore. “But we got some state money, and we were able to pull this all together.”

For more information, you can track the projects’ progress online at gowanusmod.com and wyckoffmod.com.

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