The Core Crisis: The Shelter Funnel in Action
New York City is facing a critical fiscal choice, and the intersection of 2501 86th Street (25th Ave & 86th St) has become ground zero for it.
As documented in The Shelter Funnel campaign, New York City has built an immense, multi-billion-dollar infrastructure designed to manage crises after displacement occurs rather than investing efficiently upstream. This systemic failure allows affordable tenancies to collapse across the city, only to route individuals into a shelter system that costs taxpayers up to $270 per day ($98,550 annually per unit).

At 2501 86th Street, the city is repeating this exact backwards logic. It is preparing to pump millions of public dollars into an ongoing, long-term operational lease with a private developer (The Sandhu Group) to operate a 150-bed transient single men’s shelter. This commits the public to permanent operational debt while yielding zero permanent public assets for a neighborhood supporting over 100,000 dense residents.

Following the Money: A Failure of Neighborhood Planning
Placing an institutional facility at this exact location represents a complete mismatch of local resources and infrastructure:
Vulnerable Demographics: The site sits within a high-density immediate radius of dozens of local schools, daycares, and senior centers.
A Transit Bottleneck: The footprint is directly adjacent to the 25th Avenue D-train station. Forcing a transient population hub into a vital mass transit chokepoint—used daily by thousands of young students, commuting families, and elderly residents—presents immediate public safety and pedestrian flow hazards.
Small Business Disruption: 86th Street is South Brooklyn's core central commercial strip, sustained by immigrant-owned small retail shops and markets. Introducing a large-scale transient complex threatens the economic stability and vital foot traffic of this local business corridor.

The Solution: Fund Public Asset Equity, Not Private Overhead
We are calling on the NYC Department of City Planning, the Department of Homeless Services, and NYC Parks to utilize property acquisition or eminent domain to pivot this site entirely. The city must turn 2501 86th Street into a South Brooklyn Parks and Recreation Center.
While North and Central Brooklyn recently received the state-of-the-art, 74,000-square-foot Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center in East Flatbush—equipped with indoor pools, media labs, and community kitchens—South Brooklyn remains a structural resource desert.

The Taxpayer Equation: Operational Drain vs. Capital Wealth
When we follow the money, the choice for New York City taxpayers is clear:
The Shelter Option (The Drain): Taxpayers pay infinite, recurring operational overhead to private entities. The neighborhood absorbs the strain, local small businesses lose foot traffic, and the city retains zero property equity.
The Parks & Rec Option (The Investment): Taxpayers fund a one-time capital investment to purchase the property. The city gains a permanent physical asset, local municipal jobs are created, and our local kids and seniors gain a safe, year-round multilingual civic hub.