May 1, 2020

By Michael Herzenberg (Read the story and watch the video on NY1)

Volunteers unloaded more than 500 boxes of food, putting them into their personal cars with the help of the NYPD on Friday.

They delivered them to hundreds of seniors at the 1,100 unit Dayton Beach Park affordable housing complex in Rockaway Beach.

“People need food,” said another. “People cannot go outside, people do not have money, people have not received the money from the government, so we appreciate what everybody is doing.”

The city says this is its first food delivery to many of these seniors because the development's co-op board had said it would refuse deliveries without adequate coordination and staffing.

“One board of director can’t control people's lives,” Assemblywoman Stacey Pheffer Amato said. “And today it’s about people being fed food. This is a pandemic.”

The Queen’s Democrat’s staff volunteered to deliver the food, along with dozens of workers with HPD, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

“I just think of my mother and father and I hope somebody would do that for them,” the HPD worker told NY1, choking up, in an elevator delivering the food.

HPD is involved because the complex is among the affordable housing developments in the city considered to have seniors in need of food.

“The managing agents have been able to identify and get that delivered to the residents, whether its volunteers or through the management agents directly,” HPD Deputy Commissioner Anne Marie Hendrickson said, explaining how the process typically plays out.

But in this case, the co-op board of the federally subsidized Mitchell Lama development refused to help on Tuesday, so the city had to hastily store the food nearby.

Board President Jennifer Grady wrote the city that Dayton Beach Park couldn't handle the unexpected distribution of deliveries because the complex is operating with essential staff only and faces "emergencies and COVID-19 deaths daily.”

She added that “the distribution of these boxes has caused confusion and infighting among the residents which is not wanted or needed at this time.”

The city counters that the food, including fresh vegetables and fruit, is needed by hundreds here who were suffering nutritionally without it 

Because of the delay, some of the fruit had perished. So this was a partial success.

The city says it's trying to figure out what it will do for next week’s shipment -- perhaps mobilize the volunteers sooner so storing the food nearby isn’t necessary.