The same East Village voters who handed Mayor Zohran Mamdani a landslide victory are now hauling him into court over a homeless intake center he fast-tracked into their neighborhood.
Residents in Election District 45 gave Mamdani 70.1% of the vote over independent candidate Andrew Cuomo’s 26%, according to Fox News. A group of those residents and the Village Organization for the Integrity of Community Engagement (VOICE) filed suit Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court to block the city from converting a building at 8 East 3rd Street into a citywide homeless intake center for adult men.
The lawsuit claims the administration bypassed required environmental reviews and community input by invoking a 2022 emergency declaration originally tied to the asylum-seeker crisis, Fox News reported. (RELATED: Mamdani Finds Way To Downplay Homeless Deaths After Deadly Blizzard)
The site currently functions as a 175-bed transitional housing facility run by Project Renewal, according to PIX11. The plaintiffs argue the surrounding area already bears a disproportionate share of the city’s social services. A state judge granted a temporary restraining order Wednesday, freezing the plan, NY1 reported. Both sides return to court May 7.
Oops. https://t.co/dyRTYEuhXE
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 23, 2026
“We are not against living with shelters. We all live in the East Village, they are part of the social fabric,” VOICE coalition member Caleb Berger told NY1. “What they are proposing is to move the entire intake operation, essentially the front door of the New York City, five-borough shelter system, to our narrow residential block.”
Mamdani’s office framed the project as a necessary replacement for the deteriorating Bellevue Shelter on 30th Street, which housed roughly 250 people, according to Fox News. The city aimed to vacate that site and open the East 3rd Street location by May 1.
Conservative figures quickly seized on the irony. “Oops,” Republican Tex Sen. Ted Cruz posted on X. Former Republican New York attorney general candidate Michael Henry also weighed in. “No one is more ‘not in my backyard’ than white progressives. This community voted for Mamdani in a landslide but don’t want to live with the consequences,” Henry wrote on social media.
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