The Neil Good Day Center, a homeless-services facility in East Village

Imposing conditions

Has city obligated itself to fund $100,000 study of an East Village homeless center?

by Kelly Davis

As program manager of the Neil Good Day Center, a homeless-services facility in East Village, it’s Brad Simmons’ job to make sure the center’s reputation is clean—that means no loitering outside the gates, no drugs or alcohol on the premises and at least three times a day, a small crew of volunteers from the center don fluorescent-yellow vests and walk the three blocks north to south and two blocks west to east around the center. There’s a dumpster overfilled with trash bags in the day center’s small parking lot to prove the crew’s industry.

“I don’t know of any other social-service agencies that have to put people in yellow vests and send them down the block,” Simmons says. “I don’t agree with it, but we do it.”

The Neil Good Day Center, which opened in 1991, is a city operation, a place where homeless individuals can go to take a shower, pick up their mail, get help finding a job, housing or drug-treatment or take a GED class—or just get off the street for awhile. The city contracts with the Alpha Project, the nonprofit that operates the city’s winter homeless shelter, to run the center. Federal grant money, $400,000 a year, funds the operation. Simmons estimates that since January 2005, roughly 9,000 individuals have come there for services.

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