Exclusive | Judge blocks NYC from opening ‘insane’ homeless shelter 5 feet from Manhattan grade school

A state judge has nixed a controversial plan to open a city homeless shelter for ex-cons and drug addicts steps from a lower Manhattan elementary school.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron said the city failed to fully consider “all potential negative effects” of the 106-bed facility planned for a former Hampton Inn at 320 Pearl St. – including the entrance being a mere five feet from the Peck Slip School, and an outdoor smoking area near school windows.

“There are two, eight-hundred pound gorillas in the room,” wrote Engoron in an Aug. 25 ruling.

“The first is the fact that the proposal would place a shelter for troubled adults adjacent to a school for three-to-eleven-year-olds. . . . The second . . . is the City’s cavalier attitude towards fulfilling its obligation to demonstrate that it seriously considered the siting criteria,” such as compatibility to the adjacent school.

The city’s “argument that they demonstrated that they considered the juxtaposition of the Shelter and the School by stating that they reviewed ‘public facilities and institutions’ within a 400-foot radius is whistling past the graveyard at best and disingenuous at worst,” the judge added.

The city awarded nonprofit Breaking Ground Management a five-year, $42.3 million contract in January 2024 to run a “low barrier” shelter on the site, a designation with loose regulations where criminal records and other obstacles typically used to screen residents could be lifted.

However, the NYC Department of Social Services waited until June 13, 2024 – right before summer break — to notify local elected officials, affected parents and community board members of its plans, The Post first reported.

Irate parents filed legal papers in September 2024 seeking to block the opening, saying the city’s decision “to place the riskiest homeless population with possible mental, drug, criminal, and sex offender issues directly next to young children, our most precious and vulnerable population, is not only arbitrary, capricious and irrational, it is insane.”

Under the judge’s ruling, the city’s Department of Homeless Services would have to conduct a new “Fair Share” analysis that takes into account the proposed shelter’s affect on the surrounding neighborhood.

But it was unclear Friday whether DHS would do this, and the agency also declined to answer questions about the future of its contract with Breaking Ground.

“Every neighborhood deserves to have the resources required to support New Yorkers experiencing homelessness on their path to stable, permanent housing,” said DHS spokesman Nicholas Jacobelli. “While we disagree with this court decision, we will be weighing all our options.”

Breaking Ground did not return messages.