Flock: Bums away

Faithful praise bleach vs. homeless

Parishioners at a downtown church — besieged by combative homeless people — said Sunday they back their pastor and his wife, who have kept vagrants away by pouring powdered bleach on the sidewalk.

There were no vagrants camped out Sunday at the First Ukrainian Assembly of God church, where worshippers thanked the pas- tor’ s wife, Irina Belets, for arming herself with Ajax powder.

“It’s good that they’re gone,” parishioner Roman Petrik, 44, said after services at the East Village church. “I hope God changes their mentality. They should go to work. They lay around, they go to the bathroom right in the street.”

Since late July, Belets and the church janitor have been dusting sidewalks outside her husband’s church with the powder bleach to neutralize the stench of urine and feces left behind by homeless campers at Third Avenue and East Seventh Street. The bleach wasn’t meant as a deterrent, Belets said, but “if it’s keeping them away, that’s great.”

Vagrants who had been hanging out at the church were typically men in their 20s and 30s who openly used drugs and yelled at church members going in and coming out.

The sudden disappearance of homeless at the church is a small miracle after they had become a near-nightly presence for more than two years, according to Belets.

“We’re not against homeless people. We are a church,” she said. “They don’t just sleep here. They’re drunk. They’re on drugs.”