SOME in Maspeth, a neighbourhood in New York City's Queens, were not at all pleased when they heard last year that City Hall had decided to convert a local hotel into a no-bed homeless shelter. For months they held nightly protests in front of the hotel. They demonstrated outside the homes of the hotel's owner and of the city's homelessness commissioner. Eventually they wore down City Hall, which backed down a bit from a total conversion. Only 30 homeless men are housed in the hotel now. All of them have jobs. This is not unusual: more than one in ten of New York's homeless people are employed.
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