New York has a rule, on paper, called “fair share.” It says every neighborhood is supposed to carry its portion of the things nobody wants on their block, including homeless shelters, so that the same working-class areas do not absorb all of them. Fourteen residents of Sunset Park and Greenwood Heights are now in court arguing the city broke its own rule.
Their lawsuits, reported by Brownstoner and the Brooklyn Eagle, challenge the approval of HELP Quarterstone, a 200-bed shelter for single men planned for 225 25th Street near Fourth Avenue, which the developer HELP USA says could open as soon as October. The residents argue the approval was not backed by a proper fair-share analysis or environmental review, the studies that are supposed to weigh how much a single neighborhood is already shouldering before another facility goes in.
And by their count, the neighborhood is shouldering a lot. The lawsuit says that with HELP Quarterstone, Sunset Park would be home to at least 11 shelters. The site sits near a daycare and the 25th Street R station, and local business owners have raised public-safety concerns. The complaint, in essence: if fair share means anything, a neighborhood on its eleventh shelter is past its share.
A record 194,531 people cycled through the shelter system, according to the Coalition for the Homeless’s 2026 report, the highest in history. Those people have to sleep somewhere, and City Hall has been promising to spread shelters into every neighborhood, including the wealthier ones that have historically dodged them.
The city has more homeless New Yorkers than it has ever counted. A single Brooklyn neighborhood is being asked to take an eleventh shelter while others take none. Fair share exists to spread the burden, but the scale of homelessness keeps overriding it.
History is not on the residents’ side: through the de Blasio years, no lawsuit like this one successfully stopped a shelter from opening. The case will test whether the fair-share rule is an enforceable check or just language. The shelter is still slated for the fall, and the underlying question is which neighborhoods will take the rest.
Featured image: Photo: Nancy Jiang/The City Reporter
