Norwood residents are looking to pull the rug out from under a proposed shelter at a carpet store on Webster Avenue.

Elected officials, community stakeholders and schoolchildren demonstrated across the street from Sam’s Floor Covering, in front of PS/MS 20, on Sept. 19. The business, also known as Sam’s Carpeting, at 3041 Webster Ave., filed paperwork to convert the business to a homeless shelter. Opponents of the shelter have continued to pressure the city to relocate the shelter, which would be located diagonally across from the K through 8th grade school. Parents fear the shelter would endanger their kids.

“This neighborhood is calm,” Jamie Ramirez, the mother of a seventh grader, said. “[B]ut if they put a shelter here it’s going to be chaos.” Ramirez said she’ll consider pulling her son out of school should a men’s shelter open.

Students from the school at the demonstration bore signs reading “Don’t Place a Shelter Across From Our School” and “Community Input Needed Now.” “We are all united to tell the city that we do not want a 200-bed, dormitory-style men’s shelter across the street from this school,” Councilman Andrew Cohen said at the demonstration.

The proposal is being vetted by the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS), which has had a longstanding policy of giving the community a month’s notice that a shelter is arriving. Critics call the notice unfair, seeing it as a policy that jams shelters down the throats of neighborhoods.

“Maybe, seven, eight out of 10 of them [the homeless] have a criminal background, have some kind of addiction. It’s just not a place to have near our school. A lot of our kids come and go on their own. It’s not safe for us,” Gissele Espinal, the mother of a third grader, said.

“We’re doing this at the right time at the right place to make sure they hear our voice,” Adaline-Walker Santiago, chair of Community Board 7, told reporters at the protest.

Seizing on a Crisis

For the last year, the city has attempted to quell the growing homeless population that appears to have engulfed the city. It’s moved away from the cluster-site model, placing the homeless in apartments, and shifting back to traditional shelters instead.

Nonprofit shelter providers are seizing on the homeless crisis, scouting for buildings that could be turned into shelters. Sam’s Floor Covering filed building permits early this year to add another floor to its existing two-story property and change the designation of the building to allow for sleeping accommodations, records show. The same language was found at an impending men’s only homeless shelter at 233 Landing Rd. Up to 200 people can sleep inside the Webster Avenue property should it be repurposed.

While the homeless have been routinely spotted sleeping on the grass or on benches along a stretch of Mosholu Parkway, neighboring Fordham has seen a noticeable increase. There, the homeless have set up makeshift beds near a comfort station at the corner of Fordham Road and Webster Avenue. City Department of Parks crews have since locked the station to prevent any more stay-overs.  Walker-Santiago of CB7, which covers Fordham, recalls being told by a Parks Department employee, “You don’t know the mess that was here before you [got there].”

At CB7’s general board meeting held the same day as the demonstration, NYPD officer Crystal Reveron recommended calling 311 if one spots clusters of homeless people occupying the same area. She said the complaint “hits the mayor’s office and then it hits homeless outreach and then it hits Parks Department if you call 311 for the specific area.”

There is also an initiative to provide services to the homeless in surrounding areas as well. Because of the rise of homelessness in areas like French Charley’s Park near Webster Avenue at 204th Street, Bryan Park on Fordham at Kingsbridge Road, and a small sitting area at Webster Avenue and Fordham Road, the initiative aims to provide services to the homeless by escorting them to the hospital, preventing them from breaking the law, and stopping them from disrupting pedestrian and vehicular traffic. Reveron noted that although they can’t force anyone to receive help “the [initiative] is something that we do regularly and we do have problematic areas.”

Reveron also suggests that residents call 911 if they see a homeless person in their building. “That’s trespassing,” she said. “They’re breaking the law, so I would say call 911 just to protect yourself and I do not recommend anyone confronting anyone.”

The Bronx has the most shelters in the city. DHS adheres to a “borough of origin” policy that places the homeless in the borough they lived in prior to becoming homeless.

Representatives from Sam’s Floor Covering declined to comment. 

Yara Palin contributed to this story.