Changing Times: Bank Note Building's New Landlord Wants Homeless Out

The Bronx's only drop-in center for homeless people is in the process of being forced out because the building's new landlord wants to attract a different type of clientele, according to the center's director, Noel Concepción.

The Living Room, which is run by the Citizens Advice Bureau, is located in the historic American Bank Note Building in Hunts Point. It currently serves 130-140 people a day, says Concepción. There are on-site medical services, showers, storage facilities, free meals, but no beds - which differentiates it from a shelter. Clients sleep in chairs. Many stay for months on end.

In January, the 400,000-square-foot building was sold to Taconic Investment Partners and Denham Wolf Real Estate Services for $32 million. "I think that the new owners envision Hunts Point as being the next place where there’s going to be a great deal of gentrification," said Concepción, speaking yesterday. "So they're planning to make this place a large multi-cultural arts center, and they’ve told us that our services and what we do here just don’t fit."

As one of the new owners told the Daily News: "Ideally, our tenant mix would encompass visual arts, performing groups, architects, Web designers, film production/studios, emerging green businesses and an international food market."

An international food market - whatever that is - sounds a little ambitious, but you get the picture: Yes to fancy art galleries, no to the mentally ill and those with drug and alcohol problems.

Other Bank Note Building tenants may not be safe either, because rents, of course, are set to rise. Concepción says he heard they might jump by as much as 75 percent, which is worrying Per Scholas, a non-profit that refurbishes old computers. (Majora Carter's Sustainable South Bronx, the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and others, are also based in the building.)

The Living Room's lease is up in August. If staying put isn't an option (and at the moment it isn't), Concepción wants to find another location nearby. The neighborhood, he says, attracts the homeless, particularly homeless men, because it's easy to find day jobs, such as loading and unloading trucks. Hunts Point, all talk of gentrification aside, remains poor and industrial.

The Citizens Advice Bureau was involved in the Department of Homeless Services' annual Homeless Count, held Jan. 28. Results are due in the next few weeks. Concepción says he expects the borough's unsheltered homeless population to be down on last year's count, in part because of the Living Room's success in moving the chronically homeless into permanent housing.

News Roundup for July 31

Apparently the United Nations is just as problematic a construction project as the Croton Water Filtration Plant. After some false starts, the Swedish construction firm Skanska AB, one of the contractors involved in the filtration plant, was selected by the UN to manage the renovation of its headquarters in Manhattan. Reuters has the details of the $7 million initial contract that could yield $1 billion for Skanska over time.

Gotham Gazette has a feature by a high school student from New Youth Connections , about efforts to expand mental health services and counseling in the public schools.

The New York Post looks at Joel Klein's five years as schools chancellor and his accomplishments so far. None of his predecessors has lasted that long since the post was created in 1970.

A Daily News story reports on another uninhabitable city-subsidized apartment. Tenant Steven Berry was forced to move his asthmatic kids out of the Valentine Ave. apartment because the power was cut off and he can't plug in the kids' nebulizers. Councilman Joel Rivera is calling for the Department of Homeless Services to withhold rent in situations like this.

And Bob Kapstatter reports in his Bronx Boro News (supplement to the Daily News) column (not on-line yet) that Bronx District Attorney is running unopposed again, at this point, and that Adolfo Carrion has been fined $6,875 by the Campaign Finance Board for campaign finance violations.