The Big Apple has quietly turned a former hotel into a taxpayer-funded shelter for those that are registered as sex offenders, and it is reportedly located less than 250 feet away from a kids playground.
At least five level two and level three sex offenders, which are considered the worst of the worst, are living in a homeless shelter at 61 Chrystie Street, 243 feet from the Hester Street Playground in Chinatown, the New York Post reported. One individual that is allegedly staying at the shelter raped a seven-year-old.
“There’s so much wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin,” said resident Brian Chin, the father of a four-year-old boy and a nine-year-old girl who he no longer allows on that playground.
“Finding out that the city has secretly been putting child predators into an all-expenses paid hotel overlooking the children’s park, on the taxpayer dime, it verges on being almost unbelievable,” he said. Chin is a neighborhood activist who researched the hotel and discovered the city was playing sex offenders there.
“The sheer amount of sex offenders concentrated in that one hotel, the fact that they’re free to roam around, and that it’s literally situated directly across from the kids park and the local high school, it’s appalling,” he said.
New York state law prohibits level two and level three sex offenders, who are considered at medium and high risk of reoffending, from living within 1,320 feet, or a quarter mile, of playgrounds, schools, parks and childcare facilities.
“We don’t even know how many level one sex offenders are living there because they’re not listed [in the state sex-offender registry],” Chin said of the lowest level sex predators.
The shelter was once a boutique hotel called Hotel MB and before that a Comfort Inn. It was reportedly converted into a homeless facility in the summer of 2021.
It is not clear when the city began moving in sex offenders or how many of them actually live at the site.
The shelter is run by a Bronx-based non-profit called the Neighborhood Association for Inter-Cultural Affairs Inc. (NAICA), which has pocketed nearly $1.3 billion in city contracts over the past decade, records show.
NAICA’s Chrystie Street location was part of a four-year $160.5 million contract with DHS to provide 467 beds for single adults there and at two other locations in the Bronx and Queens, as reported by the city Comptroller’s office.
Hellbound and Down 