The city’s chronic homelessness has taken on greater urgency over the course of the campaign this spring, as New York has seen an apparent rash of random assaults, often carried out by people who appeared to be homeless, mentally ill, or both.
The candidates clashed Wednesday night over whether this was more of a problem for those who are afflicted with mental illness and homelessness, or for everyone else.
Andrew Yang said the solution was simple. “We need to get them off of our streets and our subways into a better environment,” he said of mentally ill people on the streets and subways. “There will be no recovery until we resolve this.”
He promised to double the inventory of inpatient psychiatric beds in the city, a nod to the fact that many hospitals have gotten rid of psychiatric beds to build Covid-19 units.
Scott Stringer, who had spoken of the need to build tens of thousands of units of “truly affordable housing,” went on the attack. “That is the greatest non-answer I’ve ever heard in all of our debates,” he barked at Mr. Yang. “Not one specific idea.”
He defied Mr. Yang to tell him how much his plan would cost. The exchange came hours after Mayor Bill de Blasio announced plans to move 8,000 homeless people from the hotel rooms they were moved into during the pandemic back to barrackslike congregate shelters by the end of July, to make way for tourists. Many of the hotels are in Manhattan neighborhoods where long-term residents have complained that the hotel guests use drugs and create other nuisances.
Other candidates shied away from Mr. Yang’s harsh rhetoric. Maya Wiley mentioned the struggles of a formerly homeless man who goes by the name Shams DaBaron and emerged as a spokesman for the residents of one of the hotels, The Lucerne.
“When the response was to send more police into the subways where he was riding because the congregate shelters were so dangerous, he asked for help, and what he got was handcuffed and taken to jail,” Ms. Wiley said, adding that outreach to try to get people to accept placement in shelters needed to be done by “the right people,” rather than the police.
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
