Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams have been busy serving up the latest in their piecemeal plans to address street-bound homeless New Yorkers with severe mental illness.
Their single focus on conflating homelessness with public safety offers little more than compassionate window dressing while trying to look tough on crime. Neither is working.
Hochul’s newest plan will put hundreds of NYPD officers—all costing the city overtime pay —to man every overnight subway train.
By her own admission, this is only “a six-month strategy.” It’s her third round of high-profile initiatives aimed to distract from the unpredictable, vicious crime that has left the city on edge. In the past two years she’s beefed up patrols twice (including sending in the National Guard).
And in 2022, her Office of Mental Health (OMH) chief issued the “Mental Health Involuntary Removals” (MHIR) directive, authorizing NYPD and other frontline workers to remove a person by force and transport him or her for psychiatric evaluation, if the person appears unable to meet their basic living needs “even when no dangerous act (or threat to act) has been observed.”
This may sound innovative, but Hochul and Adams are merely amplifying existing New York state mental health mandates that have been on the books for years.
The most important question is: Why has nothing changed since the governor’s 2022 directive?
For one thing, sending in the National Guard or assigning officers on trains does not miraculously produce the long-term hospital beds people in crisis need. Indeed, severely mentally-ill New Yorkers who willingly seek out help are routinely turned away at the front end of our hospital system.
We’ve hemorrhaged thousands of long-term psychiatric beds over the past several years and are in desperate need of inpatient beds.
But it’s also critical to understand this: A hospital bed is not a plan. It is merely a part of a plan.
Once every patient is stabilized, they need to be transitioned into housing and psychiatric services.
And this is where Mayor Adams’ culpability comes in.
Recent press accounts documented a shocking 4,000 vacancies in NYC’s invaluable supply of supportive housing. That’s enough housing for every one of our neighbors now sleeping in public spaces!
These beds must be made available.
Last week, Adams promised 900 additional “Safe Haven” beds, which offer more private rooms and far greater social and psychiatric support.
He’s also brazenly suggested to commandeer one of the four proposed replacement jails in a years-long anticipated dismantling of Rikers Island to construct a 100-bed, “state-of-the-art” facility.
Both initiatives lacked a timeline or location — vagueness and inability to deliver is the Achilles heel of this administration.
Adams has demonstrated a lack of basic oversight for existing housing resources and an inability to coherently meld the several disjointed subway and street outreach initiatives he’s launched.
This is nothing new, it extends back to his first days in office following the tragic 2022 subway murder of Michelle Go.
Not surprisingly, New Yorkers are skeptical that fundamental change is even possible.
That’s understandable. We’ve been gaslit for over a quarter century. Since aspiring journalist Kendra Webdale was shoved to her death in 1999, every mayor and governor has assured us that yet another piecemeal plan — from court-mandated, observed medication compliance, to an endless parade of reconfigured outreach schemes — will finally end the chaos and violence on our streets and subways.
Like others who’ve spent years (sometimes decades) advocating for and building safe, affordable housing for New Yorkers with severe mental illness, we shudder at seeing our neighbors freeze to death on our streets or die a slow, public death in our subways. Our governor and mayor know this, but like their Democratic counterpart in California, Gavin Newsom, they are doubling down on divisive rhetoric, hoping to distract from their glaring malfeasance that allowed this crisis to happen.
We need to dramatically shift the paradigm away from unlimited funding for evermore ineffective outreach teams. Unless coupled with stable housing solutions, frontline workers are merely chasing after patients like grains of sand in the wind.
Rather than solely demanding upfront adherence to medication mandates and sobriety, New York must increase also investments into low-threshold permanent housing coupled with effective psychiatric services. Such efforts have dramatically reduced street homelessness in cities like Houston, Denver and Philadelphia, and eliminated virtually all homelessness in Finland. New York deserves to be next.
Mary Brosnahan is the former president and CEO of Coalition for the Homeless
