New York City plans to move 110 single homeless men, with no criminal background checks, into a converted motel in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, as early as next week, alarming residents of a neighborhood already contending with surging crime and a shelter operator under federal indictment.
The former Gold Star Inn on Emmons Avenue, which the city converted into a family shelter roughly a year ago, will be emptied of its 55 current families and repurposed for adult men. The Department of Homeless Services confirmed that no criminal background vetting will take place for the incoming residents, the New York Post reported.
The shelter sits directly across the street from Lew Fidler Park, a popular family gathering spot with a playground.
City Councilwoman Inna Vernikov, a Brooklyn Republican, fired off a letter this week to the Department of Social Services objecting to the plan. Her language left nothing to interpretation:
"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."
Vernikov added that the consequences of placing single adult men in residential neighborhoods are well documented.
"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 response was boilerplate. A DSS spokesperson said 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." No details about what those good neighbor policies entail were provided.
The spokesperson also offered a rationale for the conversion: more single homeless men and fewer families are entering the system, and the city prefers to place families in traditional shelters rather than hotels.
Residents of Sheepshead Bay do not need a policy memo to know what they are living with. NYPD data for the 61st Precinct, the area covering the neighborhood, shows shooting incidents up 400 percent so far in 2026. Retail theft has risen 10 percent. Reports of rape have doubled, from eight at this point last year to sixteen.
Those numbers describe a precinct already under pressure. Neighbors say the existing shelter has already changed daily life on Emmons Avenue.
Fahad, a 30-year-old plumber from nearby Brighton Beach, described the shift plainly:
"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 withheld her last name, questioned the city's judgment directly:
"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 originally from Moscow, said she already believes a recently released prisoner is living at the shelter. "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 organization running the Sheepshead Bay shelter, a nonprofit called BHRAGS, carries its own baggage. BHRAGS started as a Brooklyn homecare provider before converting into a shelter operator in 2022. City officials have said the Adams administration brought the group into the shelter system to handle the migrant crisis.
In March, federal prosecutors indicted BHRAGS executive director Roberto Samedy and former board chairman Jean Ronald Tirelus on charges of allegedly raking in $1.3 million in illicit payments, wire fraud, and embezzlement. The federal probe has also reportedly touched prominent Democrats, though specifics remain limited.
That indictment did not stop Mayor Zohran Mamdani from handing BHRAGS nearly $200 million in new city contracts in June, just three months after the charges dropped. City officials defended the move by saying they had removed "bad actors" and that BHRAGS now operates under new administration. They noted the nonprofit's portfolio had been slashed from nine shelters to four.
The decision to pour taxpayer money into an organization whose leadership faces federal corruption charges raises an obvious question: who exactly is vetting the vetters? The city will not screen the men moving into the shelter, and the organization managing them is itself under criminal investigation.
Mayor Mamdani's record of prioritizing ideology over the concerns of ordinary New Yorkers extends well beyond homeless shelters. His administration has pledged defiance of Supreme Court rulings on deportation protections, a posture that signals where the mayor's loyalties sit when federal law and progressive politics collide.
The 55 families currently housed at the Gold Star Inn will be relocated, though the city has not disclosed where they are going. The swap, families out, 110 unscreened men in, doubles the population density of the facility while eliminating the one demographic feature that gave neighbors a measure of reassurance.
Families with children, whatever challenges they bring, are not typically the population that drives the loitering, open drug use, and property crime that residents describe. Single adult men with no screening represent a fundamentally different risk profile, and everyone on Emmons Avenue knows it.
The DSS spokesperson's invocation of "stigma" is telling. In the agency's framing, the problem is not that 110 men with unknown criminal histories will live steps from a children's playground. The problem is that neighbors are worried about it. The city's posture treats community safety concerns as a public relations issue to be managed, not a legitimate objection to be answered.
This is the same administration whose reassignment of an NYPD captain after he criticized the mayor on camera sent a clear message about how dissent is handled inside City Hall.
Step back and the picture sharpens. A city government converts a shelter from families to unscreened single men. It awards nearly $200 million in contracts to a nonprofit whose top officials face federal fraud charges. It declines to run criminal background checks on the incoming residents. And when neighbors object, the official response is that they suffer from "stigma."
Councilwoman Vernikov's letter asked the questions any responsible elected official should ask. Where are the safeguards? Who is accountable if a sex offender or violent felon ends up across the street from a playground? What recourse do residents have?
The city has offered no answers, only platitudes about open communication and good neighbor policies it has not defined.
Mamdani's broader governing philosophy has drawn scrutiny from multiple directions. He used America's 250th birthday celebration to denounce capitalism and law enforcement, a performance that revealed how little his priorities overlap with those of working-class neighborhoods like Sheepshead Bay.
Meanwhile, his administration's foreign policy ambitions have drawn their own controversy, with the State Department blocking a planned sit-down between a Mamdani official and Iran's UN ambassador.
None of that helps Fahad, Ginny, or Olga Adynets sleep easier at night. They are the ones who will live with whatever walks through the doors of the Gold Star Inn next week. The mayor will not.
The conversion could begin as early as next week. No public hearing has been described. No community vote has been referenced. The city has announced its decision and dared the neighborhood to accept it.
Sheepshead Bay's residents are not asking for anything radical. They want to know who is moving in next door. They want the city to run the most basic check, a criminal background screen, before housing 110 strangers beside a children's park. That is not stigma. That is common sense.
When a government treats the safety of its own residents as an inconvenient talking point, it has stopped governing and started managing optics. The people of Sheepshead Bay deserve better than a press release.
