On the Bowery last Friday, a man who gave his name only as Jay was cleaning his white Nike sneakers with a toothbrush. He had just stayed at The Bowery Mission for the first time the night before. “I used to work at CBGBs in the day,” he said, pointing down the street to where the legendary punk venue once was, reminiscing for a minute. Things are different now.

“You can’t go to sleep nowhere. Can’t sit on a bench in a park. Can’t even have a beer—you get arrested. Everything is trespassing,” he said.

From the Bowery, we ventured uptown to 32nd Street, where we spotted a blind man with a black bowl asking people for help. “Have a blessed day,” he said to passersby. In the half hour we watched him work, only two people, a construction worker and a suit, stopped to drop a dollar.

A few blocks away, on the steps of the 34th Street post office, several other people passed the time, apparently without anywhere else to be. An elderly man crouched in a fetal position and picked at his arms, shaking uncontrollably as he focused on his efforts. His shirt said “New York.”

The Greenpoint Reformed Church. (jessica.dailey, flickr)

They're not against housing the homeless per se, but Milton Street residents just feel that some other block or some other neighborhood would be a better choice, a more appropriate choice.

“I’m not against the homeless having someplace to go, but not like this," Don Stella told The Brooklyn Paper, differentiating himself from those who believe the homeless should not, in fact, have someplace to go.

The center of the controversy is a 10-bed shelter at the Greenpoint Reformed Church, the Paper reports, which opened in November. The Reformed Church was the only local church that stepped up to the task when the Department of Homeless Services called for organizations willing to host a respite shelter. The church will be paid $100,000 annually for housing the men, which the church says goes largely to the salaries of the staff running the shelter, the remainder to supplies and building upkeep.

Neighbors complain of vomit and urine-drenched sidewalks, catcalls, yelling and other intolerable changes to the street since the homeless shelter opened. The charges seem a little trumped up, given that the church only houses 10 men, unlike the 200-bed shelter that opened on McGuinness Boulevard in September. That shelter also faced strong neighborhood opposition, with locals objecting to the city busing in homeless from other parts of the city rather than serving the older Polish homeless men who populated the local streets as well as McGolrick and McCarren parks.

But unlike the McGuinness Boulevard shelter, which went through a tedious approval process,the church shelter opened quickly, to give the local population a place to go on cold nights after the Church of Ascension backed out of hosting the respite shelter in November.

Pastor Ann Kansfield has defended the 10-bed shelter, as well as the church's other charitable projects—a food bank and a soup kitchen because, well, isn't helping the less fortunate what churches are supposed to do?

But outraged neighbors say helping the homeless is the last straw.

“I’ve held my breath when walking by crates of produce that were delivered to the Church that sat out on the curb in the sun," resident Margaret McMahon wrote in a letter to her neighbors, according to The Greenpoint Gazette.  “[A friend once said to me], ‘What concerns me most is this is just the beginning, first a food bank – what’s next, a homeless shelter?’ I laughed and I said that would never happen. Well, here we are, Milton Street is now the proud owner of a food bank, a soup kitchen, and a homeless shelter.”

The controversy is one of many happening in Brooklyn's gentrified and gentrifying neighborhoods. Carroll Gardens, for example, is battling the conversion of a defunct condo project into a 120-bed shelter.

In both cases, neighbors claim that the projects have been rushed through the approval process (respite bed programs, which are temporary in nature, do not require the same approvals as permanent programs). And while it may be true that residents should be informed of changes to their neighborhoods, and that the city's homelessness policies leave something (or a lot) to be desired, the arguments put forward by neighbors tend to be that they simply don't want to host poor people in their neighborhoods and that other streets, or other neighborhoods, are better suited to the task.

As one Carroll Gardens resident told The Times in October, “I didn’t spend my whole life helping make Carroll Gardens a decent place to let somebody do a dumb idea like this.”

The implication being that housing the poor would somehow make the neighborhood a bad place, that the homeless are somehow not decent, and that they are not our responsibility, even as their numbers swell—in 2012, the number spiked to more than 46,000 adults and children—in our rapidly gentrifying city.

kvelsey@observer.com

In the East Village, shortly before nightfall.

"As long as you stay indoors, you're probably safe," Mayor Bloomberg told the reporters at this evening's latest press conference. But what about the people for whom it isn't that simple? The Observer is getting reports that even as Sandy roars our way, some of the city's most vulnerable--the homeless--are still outside.

As late as this evening, an Observer source found a group of people at Eighth Street and Second Avenue with no plans to leave for a drop-in or emergency center. "We got shelter right here," one man told her.

Nor are they alone. Earlier today, a freelance photographer posted a lengthy interview with James, a man who seemed to believe he couldn't go back into the shelter system for another two months and who, thanks to difficulties getting help during Hurricane Irene, seemed to have written off the emergency shelters as an option and wasn't going to bother:

"No, they don't want us there. These shelters are for the good folks, the families that get evacuated. There is no room in there for me."

The city has made extensive efforts to get the word out about the coming storm, with press conferences every few hours, social media blasts and data-rich sources of information like this collaboration with Google. But those initiatives are more tailored to those of us with smartphones and stable internet connections. Different arrangements have to be made for the homeless population. Mayor Bloomberg has reassured the city via Twitter and at his numerous pressers that an "intense effort" is underway to reach those still on the streets, with an eye to those in Zone A.

To get more details on those outreach efforts, we spoke to the Department of Homeless Services spokesperson Heather Janik, who told us that outreach teams have been on the case since Sunday morning with an "extremely enhanced" presence.

"It was a larger than usual amount of people going out there and really going out there and trying to warn people about how bad the weather was going to be and making contact with as many of our known clients as possible," she told The Observer. In partnership with the NYPD's homeless outreach unit, the DHS's outreach teams have managed to bring 175 people inside, and she estimates there are only about 10 "known individuals" left in Zone A.

"Outreach teams have been actively out there, getting the word out about the storm and telling them, you know, where they can come into. We have informed 311 about drop-in centers being open 24 hours a day, about shelters, it being code-blue status so anyone can walk in."

"The teams are out there letting everyone know, and they know the people who are out there," added Ms. Janik.

UPDATED: We also followed up with Ms. Janik for a bit more detail on the types of facilities to which the homeless approached by the outreach are being directed--specifically, whether they're being directed to evacuation centers or to homeless shelters. She replied, "They go to special low-threshold housing I was telling you about, designed just for them (Safe Havens and stabilization beds), while some opt for drop-in centers or traditional [homeless] shelter." Those specially designed facilities are smaller and, she explained, have different rules meant to serve the long-term homeless who might be resistant to traditional shelters.

Nevertheless, it seems that many homeless are staying put--many of them outside Zone A, which might not be as dangerous but certainly isn't wholly safe, either. The Huffington Post has more accounts, and we're also seeing reports on Twitter:

Just been out in Midtown - many homeless still on streets, bunked down in doorways. No sign of promised city outreach patrols. @rafsanchez

— Jeremy Cliffe (@JeremyCliffe) October 29, 2012

@mikebloomberg There are some homeless men on the Greenpoint Av/Manhattan Av corner. I called the local police but the men are still there.

— Jessica Murray (@jessicak_murray) October 29, 2012

Some stayed on the streets during last year's Hurricane Irene. But with howling winds gusting and record storm surge predicted, Sandy stands a good chance of being a more severe redux.

"Hopefully we've gotten everybody that we possibly can in," said Mayor Bloomberg at this evening's press conference, when The Observer asked about the specifics of the measures taken thus far. "There are some people that are just very difficult, they want to avoid interacting with others, and how you get to those has always been a challenge and as far as I know, we're doing a good job with that."

With additional reporting by Hunter Walker.

Justin Timberlake has some jerk friends! (YouTube)

– How's this for a wedding present: Justin Timberlake's buddy, real estate agent Justin Huchel, filmed a bunch of homeless people wishing the best for the actor/singer and his new bride, Jessica Biel. See, it's funny because what could the homeless possibly offer Hollywood royalty except wishes? Not everyone thinks this joke is in good taste, but then they probably haven't seen Biel's wedding dress. (Video after the jump.)

http://youtu.be/DMHcGFmhB_s
– Taylor Swift and Conor Kennedy broke up. It's probably for the best, though we hope it doesn't end up with her writing a song called "Camelot."

– If we were sending out good vibes to a celebrity right now, it would be Diddy, who was in a serious car crash yesterday in L.A. No one was hospitalized, but seriously ... this is why we all take the subway.

– Last night was GQ’s Gentleman's Ball. Starring Adam Levine, Ted Danson and Willie Geist, the three biggest gentlemen in the biz.

Sorry, did we say investigate? We meant  "snapped some photos as he was walking by" before speculating on a trend story about a new "fashion" (wrong word but right idea) among some young people—including college students well housed in dorms and apartments here in downtown Manhattan—who did this panhandling/begging as a kind of lark."  (The logic here is that this lady is a hipster in disguise, and not, as one might assume, just a pregnant, homeless person who hasn't gotten around to updating their sign yet.)

Evidence of this prince/pauper trend Columbia asserts in his post—which then seamlessly (not seamlessly) transitions into party coverage of Hilary and Wilbur Ross' penthouse event to address real poverty and honor Citigroup's Vikram Pandit—includes readers sending in photos of young panhandlers with "new" looking sneakers and expensive glasses frames. Also, the guys are way too clean-shaven to actually be homeless. Hipsters are the worst, right??

The issue is that Columbia and the rest of the upper crust just care too much, allowing these young con artists to make marks of  "us who empathize" with the plight of the actual poor-poor. (Empathy now defined not by how much money you give, but how many photos  you can snap at the homeless with your iPhone before heading to penthouse events honoring bank CEOs).

Maybe David should go back down to Bergdorf's and confront the faux-pregnant woman, Michael Moore-style, demanding that she expose herself as the NYU student she actually is. Then he could make her donate all her panhandling proceedings to Accion International, c/o Pandit and the Ross family.

God, the nerve of the nouveau-riche poor.

On his weekly radio show, Bloomberg and his commissioner for homeless services warned about the impacts of proposed cuts from Albany.

"This will cause the shelter system to back up. We may have to build 70 new shelters thorough the city," [Comissioner Seth] Diamond said, putting the cost to the city at $80 million dollars.

But minutes after touting the benefits of helping the homeless transition into jobs and homes, the mayor slammed a proposal to force developers who receive city subsidies to pay workers a so-called living wage, which many peg at at least $10 an hour — significantly higher than minimum wage.

"When government tries to get involved and force the economics to something that the market won't tolerate, it's the Soviet Union. That didn't work out very well in case you haven't read your history recently," he said.

Labor operative Dan Morris piles on, emailing me to say Bloomberg, "supports government intervention into the market when it means large tax breaks and subsidies for large companies and developers."

In short, they suggest there's something inconsistent: supporting the government when they help people get out of poverty, but opposing the government when they mandate the private sector do likewise.

If a city-wide vacant lot count would indeed cost "millions of dollars" then I believe we should look to more creative options, rather than throw up our hands and pull the plug on this important initiative. One possible approach to a vacant lot count that keeps costs low would be to utilize volunteers from the mayor's NYC Service program.

The City already dispatches volunteers for its annual street homeless count, so this approach would not be without precedent. And, to be honest, counting vacant lots isn't rocket science. It would require a minimal amount of training. Most able bodied New Yorkers interested in enhancing the long-term vitality of their communities could make a positive contribution by participating in a city-wide vacant lot count.

I call on the City Council to reconsider this decision and let this badly-needed housing program go forward. We cannot afford to be pennywise and pound foolish at a time when the recession has made day to day survival for the homeless tougher than ever.

It almost sounds like Stringer is attackng Quinn here. As though they both had plans of running the mayor's NYC Service program, among other things, in a couple of years.

mchaban [at] observer.com / @mc_nyo

According to the Gotham Gazette's Wonkster blog, Council Speaker Christine Quinn was none too keen on the plan:

"Collecting that data is enormously expensive," Quinn said, putting the cost at "millions of dollars." In tough fiscal times, she added, "that money may be better spent assisting the homeless."

It's a fair point, but Picture the Homeless argues a census can be achieved for less than $50,000. The Real Estate Desk wonders if this doesn't have less to do with serving the homesless than serving developers, though. From WNYC:

The Rent Stabilization Association, a landlord group, says the Cenus Bureau already produces a housing and vacancy survey for the city. A spokesman questioned whether a new census is necessary.

Indeed, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer (a mayoral hopeful, like Quinn), has been calling for a similar census for some years, as he hopes it will put an end to the practice of "warehousing," whereby developers sit on vacant or underused property. The idea is not to build until a greater profit can be made, but it also means there are fewer apartments -- not only for the homeless but for all New Yorkers, thus driving up prices for everyone.

The census has support from nearly half the council, but until Quinn is prepared to bring it to the Housing Committee, it is unlikely to get there.