New York City is preparing to move 110 single homeless men, with no criminal background checks, into a converted motel in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, displacing 55 families already sheltered there and alarming residents in a neighborhood where shootings have spiked 400 percent this year.
The move could happen as early as next week, and the shelter operator collecting the city's money is the same nonprofit whose top executives were federally indicted just months ago on fraud and embezzlement charges.
City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a Republican representing the district, fired off a letter this week to the Department of Social Services after the Department of Homeless Services confirmed it would conduct no criminal background vetting on the incoming men. The former Gold Star Inn on Emmons Avenue, turned into a family shelter roughly a year ago, sits directly across from Lew Fidler Park, a popular family gathering spot with a playground.
Vernikov's letter laid out the stakes in blunt terms. As the New York Post reported, the councilwoman wrote:
"The Department of Homeless Services confirmed that no criminal background vetting will take place, leaving room for potential sex offenders and convicted felons to come in contact with our children."
She added that the conversion would be "devastating" for the surrounding community. In a second statement cited by the Post, Vernikov warned of what other neighborhoods have already experienced:
"This will be devastating for the surrounding neighborhood and community. We have seen the impacts of bringing a single adult male shelter into a residential community: loitering, drugs, and criminal activity."
The city's Department of Social Services offered a different take. A DSS spokesperson told the Post the agency "continues to address the prevalent stigma against single adult men experiencing homelessness" and "implements good neighbor policies while maintaining open lines of communication with the community to address any concerns as they arise."
That language, "stigma" and "good neighbor policies", landed poorly with residents already watching crime climb in the 61st Precinct, the NYPD command covering Sheepshead Bay.
NYPD data for the 61st Precinct tell a grim story. Shooting incidents are up 400 percent so far this year. Retail theft has risen 10 percent. Reports of rape have doubled, from eight at this point last year to 16 in 2026.
The city has not publicly attributed those increases to the shelter's presence. But the residents who live next to it have drawn their own conclusions.
Fahad, a 30-year-old plumber from nearby Brighton Beach, told the Post what he has seen firsthand:
"People are breaking into cars, people are destroying the park, taking their pants down in the park. It used to be very quiet."
Ginny, a 50-year-old neighbor who declined to give her last name, questioned the city's decision not to screen the men. As Fox News also reported, she asked plainly:
"Not checking the background is not very diligent of the city. How can say they are protecting children when they allow that? There are also elderly people who can be targets."
Olga Adynets, a 37-year-old neighbor originally from Moscow, said she already sees trouble. "Someone who was just released from prison is now living at the shelter," she told the Post. "I don't want it to get worse. I'm worried."
The shelter operator adds another layer of concern. BHRAGS, a Brooklyn-based homecare provider that pivoted to running shelters in 2022, is the organization managing the Emmons Avenue site. In March, its executive director Roberto Samedy and former board chairman Jean Ronald Tirelus were indicted on federal charges for allegedly raking in $1.3 million through illicit payments, wire fraud, and embezzlement.
City officials told the Post they had gotten rid of "bad actors" and that BHRAGS is now under new management. They also said the nonprofit's portfolio had been cut from nine shelters to four. Officials blamed the prior administration of Mayor Eric Adams for bringing the troubled provider into the fold to deal with the migrant crisis.
Yet Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has built a rising national profile on the progressive left, handed BHRAGS nearly $200 million in new city contracts in June. That decision came three months after the federal indictments.
The timeline bears repeating: indictments in March, $200 million in fresh contracts in June, and 110 unscreened men headed to a residential neighborhood as early as next week.
The Sheepshead Bay shelter conversion does not exist in a vacuum. It fits a broader pattern under Mamdani's City Hall, where ideological commitments routinely override the practical concerns of the people who actually live in affected neighborhoods.
This is the same mayor who renewed his call to abolish ICE even as federal agents faced hostile crowds in Brooklyn. It is the same administration that has refused to enforce federal court rulings on deportation protections when they conflict with the mayor's political preferences.
The DSS spokesperson's statement is revealing in what it prioritizes. The agency's first concern is not public safety. It is not the 55 families being displaced. It is "stigma." The city frames any objection to housing unscreened men near playgrounds and elderly residents as a bias problem, a perception to be managed, not a legitimate safety concern to be addressed.
The city says it prefers to place families in traditional shelters rather than hotels. That may be a reasonable administrative preference. But it does not explain why 110 men are being moved in without the most basic screening that any private landlord in the five boroughs would conduct before handing over a set of keys.
Mamdani's administration has also pressed forward with an aggressive economic agenda that has driven investment out of the city. The shelter decision reflects the same governing instinct: pursue the ideological goal, dismiss the downstream costs, and lecture anyone who objects.
The people who will live with the consequences of this decision are not the officials who made it. They are the families across the street in Lew Fidler Park. They are the elderly residents Ginny worries about. They are the plumber from Brighton Beach who watched his neighborhood change.
They did not ask for a shelter run by a federally indicted nonprofit. They did not ask for 110 unscreened men. They did not ask for a city that treats their safety concerns as "stigma."
Several questions remain unanswered. What specific "good neighbor policies" does DSS actually enforce? Who is now running BHRAGS after the indictments? Why did the city award nearly $200 million in new contracts to an organization under active federal investigation? And what recourse do residents have if the city proceeds over their objections?
The federal government has already signaled it is willing to confront Mamdani's administration on enforcement matters. Whether that extends to oversight of how the city spends hundreds of millions on shelter contracts with indicted operators remains to be seen.
For now, the residents of Sheepshead Bay are left with a city government that cannot explain why it will not run a basic criminal background check, and a mayor who seems far more worried about stigma than safety.
When a city treats its own residents' fears as a public-relations problem, it has stopped governing and started lecturing. The people of Sheepshead Bay deserve better than a sermon.
