http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/opinion/in-queens-seceding-from-the-homeless-crisis.html 2016-10-11 09:41:44 In Queens, Seceding From the Homeless Crisis A plan to shelter some families in a local hotel prompts protests in a largely white, middle-class area. === “STOP the War on the Middle Class,” said one marcher’s sign. “Dump Communist de Blasio,” said another, the small “d” made from a hammer and sickle. And this: “Maspeth Lives Matter.” Maspeth is a white-hot corner of Queens these days, judging from the rage that has greeted Mayor The city’s top official on homelessness, Steven Banks, says existing shelters are bursting and the city must, by law, put these people somewhere. Until broader efforts to build affordable housing bear fruit, hotel shelters are a stopgap. Mr. Banks wants to spread them around the city, on the theory that everyone must share the burden. Hence the plan to place adult families — couples and parents with grown children — in the 110-room hotel in Maspeth, in Community Board 5, where there are no shelters now. It’s a burden many locals want no part of, seeing only — in one small hotel — an apocalypse of falling property values, crime and vagrancy. For weeks they have been A While Maspeth burns with indignation, the larger city has a problem on its hands. The shelter population is at an all-time high, nearly 60,000, which would overflow Citi Field. An abundance of panhandlers and sidewalk sleepers in Manhattan feeds an anecdotal sense that homelessness is out of control. City Hall’s defense is that the crisis has been building for decades and will take time to reverse. That the gap between stagnant wages and rising rents is wider than ever. And that things would be much worse but for its all-out efforts to stem the problem. That means building or preserving 200,000 affordable apartments, building 15,000 units of supportive housing, pouring money into legal services, so people don’t get evicted, and stabilizing the supply of rent-regulated apartments. It means making shelters safe and closing notoriously decrepit “cluster site” apartments in private buildings so they can be renovated for permanent housing. And, for now, it means sending people to hotels. Mr. Banks told the meeting that Maspeth needs to be part of the solution because it’s part of the problem: More than 200 people in the shelter system used to live in Community Board 5. Maspeth protesters don’t believe it, or don’t care, and are trying to spread their virulent not-in-my-backyardism across Queens, vowing never to give in to a Brooklynite mayor they ridicule and despise. So far the rage has been winning. The city has backed away from plans to fill the Maspeth Holiday Inn with homeless families. Instead it is renting individual rooms, and as of Monday had placed 30 single men there. Officials were bracing for the protesters to return on Monday night. This dismal situation cries out for negotiation. It calls to mind the late Gov. Mario Cuomo, who was an obscure Queens lawyer in 1972 when Mayor John Lindsay asked him to mediate a ferocious dispute over low-income housing in Forest Hills. This he did, brilliantly. In his report, he cited a 1775 speech by Edmund Burke: “All government — indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act — is founded on compromise.” Gov.