By New York Post (Opinion) | Created at 2025-01-12 12:06:00 | Updated at 2025-01-16 12:15:16
4 days ago
Last Thursday, Mayor Adams went up to Harlem to make his fourth State of the City address — his last one before his June re-election primary.
The mayor’s speech was a snapshot of his re-election dilemma, and that of the voters: On broad policy and plans, he’s often right.
It’s just that he bumbles the execution.
The mayor’s big idea last week was tackling street and subway homelessness.
Adams wants to “invest” $650 million over five years across three homeless initiatives, two of which target the homeless population responsible for public disorder and, often, violent crime.
The mayor’s first proposal would add 900 more “safe haven” shelter beds, for a total of 4,900.
Unlike traditional men’s homeless shelters, safe haven shelters offer single rooms, and what the mayor called “personalized support” for residents. People who reject shelters because they see them as dangerous or chaotic often accept safe haven shelter.
The second proposal would create a 100-bed housing facility for homeless people with serious mental illness.
These ideas are good, but their presentation highlights the mayor’s deficiencies.
Adams offered no firm timeline for the new psychiatric facility, and no proposed location.
That would be OK if the mayor had built up a track record of executing on big things in his first three years in office — but he hasn’t.
His main public-works project so far, remaking Fifth Avenue, won’t even start construction until 2028.
Plus, it’s rather late in the day to be announcing this idea.
No, of course a mayor doesn’t have to propose all his plans on his first day in office.
But this mayor (and the governor) have allegedly been focusing on the crisis of the seriously mentally ill homeless since 2022.
That year, on his sixth day in office, the mayor stood with Gov. Hochul and promised to focus on “serious criminals, like the one that stabbed the individual . . . yesterday, on the subway system.”
A month later, weeks after a different crazed attacker had pushed Michelle Go to her death under a Times Square subway train, the mayor and governor were back together, promising a comprehensive “subway safety plan” — again, with a focus on homelessness and mental illness.
It would be one thing, too, if the mayor were building on steady progress that New Yorkers can see.
But last year, with 12 homicides, was the deadliest year on the subways since the mid-1990s.
With the third anniversary of Go’s murder this Wednesday, New Yorkers are well past impatient.
So the stats the mayor ticked off during his speech last week aren’t compelling.
Yes, it’s great that the mayor’s initiatives, including previous expansion of “safe haven” beds, have helped 8,000 people, as he says, but when will that mean safer subways for the rest of us?
Finally: The mayor’s third homelessness initiative in this $650 million package doesn’t fit with the other two.
“Today, we’re making a new commitment to our families,” he said. “No child should ever be born in our shelter system,” as about 1,000 are each year.
“We’ll launch a new program to . . . help people” in shelter “find permanent housing before their child is born,” so that “mothers and babies do not go to a shelter after leaving the hospital.”
This sounds nice, but it’s not well thought through.
New York shouldn’t do anything to encourage people to become pregnant while in a city shelter as a fast-track into an apartment.
By throwing this idea in with the other two, Adams is trying to protect his left flank: Several of his primary challengers have proposed their own homelessness programs.
But why not focus all new social-service resources on serious mental illness, until we’ve got the disorder stemming from that crisis back down at least to 2019 levels on the streets and subways?
Come June, the voters’ choice will be this: Do they want more Adams, complete with his one-step-forward-half-a-step-back record of implementation?
Or do they want a Dem to his left, promising a clean slate but inevitably even more expansive social-services policies?
Adams doesn’t need to compete with them on proposing additional social-services spending.
He does need to show some progress on his core issues, including homelessness as it relates to public safety.
As Adams reminded voters during his State of the City speech, “When we came into office, we said the days of letting people languish on our streets and subways were over.”
But New Yorkers are still asking: When will they ever end?
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.
