A private housing agency is sending shock waves through a Queens neighborhood by pushing a proposal to create the nation’s largest homeless shelter with room for 1,200 women and children, The Post has learned.
The agency, Homes for the Homeless, has asked for city approval to expand its Saratoga Family Inn Residence in Springfield Gardens by adding a new building with 151 rooms. The facility now has 259 rooms and about 800 residents.
“It will be a homeless city,” fumed J. Clifford Gadsden, a neighbor and a member of Community Board 13. “The number of people living in the shelter will be equal to the number of homeowners and their families in the neighborhood.”
Gadsden said the shelter proposal was already rejected by the community board and by Queens Borough President Helen Marshall.
But the not-for-profit agency is continuing to press for the project before the city’s Board of Standards and Appeals, hiring the politically-connected firm of Fischbein, Badillo, Wagner and Harding to argue its case before the board this month.
The sprawling complex was a Holiday Inn until 1987, when it was purchased by the not-for-profit group founded by wealthy real-estate developer and Manhattan hotelier Leonard Stern.
Stern didn’t respond to requests for comment. Officials at Homes for the Homeless, run by Ralph Nuñez, a former deputy commissioner in the city’s Human Resources Administration, also did not return several calls.
The Saratoga Inn is one of a dozen homeless shelters within five miles of each other in Queens, including the city’s largest, the Carlton House, run by the Salvation Army.
“Enough is enough,” said Gadsden, adding that the neighborhood’s civic group settled a lawsuit with Homes for the Homeless in 1988 that capped the shelter’s size at 259 rooms.
The city’s Department of Homeless Services pays Homes for the Homeless $92 a night for each family sheltered at the Saratoga Inn, or $724,768 a month. If the shelter is expanded, that would rise to $1,147,316 a month.
The plan to super-size the Saratoga Inn has left advocates for the homeless befuddled.
“Everything we’ve learned in the field is that smaller shelters work better,” said Patrick Markee, a spokesman for the New York City Coalition for the Homeless.