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As mayoral transitions go, Zohran Mamdani’s has been relatively quiet. The respite ended last week, as did the fleeting hope that the naive socialist had used the month since his election to get schooled on the complexity of the problems he is about to inherit.
No such luck.
The new mayor, who takes office Jan. 1, inadvertently revealed he has learned nothing about homelessness when he announced Thursday that his administration will not dismantle the fetid camps springing up around the city.
The reason, he claimed, is that Mayor Adams’ policy of removing the camps lacks compassion and has not led to the people involved being placed into permanent housing with appropriate social services.
“If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you’re doing to be a success,” Mamdani sneered.
He prattled on by saying, “Whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is, because what we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact, it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made.”
Would-be revolutionary
That’s the sound of a 34-year-old novice spouting campaign slogans as if he’s got some superior insight into a problem that has defied a solution for decades.
Because he doesn’t have anything new and realistic to offer, Mamdani will almost certainly make the problem worse instead of even modestly better, and waste gazillions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
The core issue is that Mamdani is not a reformer in the traditional sense of someone who wants to repair broken and ineffective operations.
Rather, he fancies himself a revolutionary and a leftist savior who sees America and New York as fundamentally flawed and in desperate need of a do-over.
Like his core radical supporters, he’d rather burn the house down than paint it.
Those qualities make him fundamentally unfit for the job he’s about to start, and it won’t be long before New Yorkers start to see the impact of their hiring mistake.
Under Mamdani’s misguided ideas, homeless encampments likely will start to expand and proliferate all over the city. Worse, they will be allowed to remain and grow, thereby inflicting their blight and dangers on residential neighborhoods and commercial districts throughout the five boroughs.
When that happens, New Yorkers won’t be able to claim they weren’t warned.
Anyone paying even an iota of attention during the mayoral campaign had to know that Mamdani’s radical ideas would put Gotham’s always-fragile quality of life on an express train backwards.
Although his loopy promises of free this and free that, along with his calls for tax hikes on high earners and smears of the NYPD, understandably got most of the attention, he also put forth a series of other terrible ideas that would disrupt much of life as we know it.
To judge from the results, most New York voters didn’t pay attention to the long list of nonsense, but Eric Adams certainly did.
When I interviewed the mayor last September, after he had ended his re-election campaign, Adams brought up the importance of dismantling the homeless camps.
He acknowledged it was not an ideal approach, but argued it was the best option available for the occupants as well as for the people living and working nearby.
The mayor believed, and I agree with him, the policy is essentially compassionate and kept large stretches of the city from being overrun by the squalor of homeless compounds commonly found in other cities.
165,000 calls
In fact, the Adams administration reports that it dismantled more than 18,000 camps during his tenure, some involving just one person, while others involved a group of inhabitants.
In most cases, it moved the homeless into warm and safe city shelters.
Most of those actions followed New Yorkers calling 311 to complain about the camps, with the city reporting it received more than 165,000 calls on the issue, with 100,000 coming in just the last two years.
Numbers that large show the scope of the problem and defeat the appeal of Mamdani’s nostrums.
In the interview, Adams raised the camp topic and others by saying that most “people don’t understand how much power a mayor has.”
Citing several of Mamdani’s outrageous promises, Adams put it this way: “He could tell the Police Department not to enforce prostitution and shoplifting crimes and not to go after lower level drug dealers.”
The NYPD would have to obey, and then Adams added, “When homeowners in Brooklyn and Queens start seeing teenagers selling their bodies on the streets and using drugs and see homeless encampments popping up in their neighborhoods,” they shouldn’t be shocked because that would be the result of Mamdani’s warped vision.
And so now comes tangible proof that Adams was right, and that Mamdani intends to begin immediately inflicting pain on the people who foolishly elected him.
It’s additionally grating that the mayor-elect acts like he has unique insights that eluded previous mayors and social service experts over the last 40 years.
In fact, Mamdani is apparently ignorant of the voluminous research and experience showing that homeless people aren’t homeless because they simply lost their keys or fell behind on their rent.
Study after study has documented that nearly all homeless people have serious mental illnesses, and/or drug and alcohol addictions.
Even with services, most are incapable of working or sticking to regulated, orderly lifestyles in housing of their own.
City agencies have that knowledge, and yet, despite the gargantuan and enormously expensive targeted efforts to help the homeless, the problem persists and even expands.
Easy to say, hard to do
After initially running its programs out of the welfare agency, the city created a dedicated separate agency to help the homeless. It has also spent truckloads of taxpayer money on housing, food, medical care, and drug and psychiatric treatment, along with other services.
The annual budget of the Department of Homeless Services now runs as high as $4 billion, yet the number of those needing help continues to grow beyond capacity.
One advocacy group calculated that the city spends over $30,000 per homeless person per year.
Does our Wonder Boy next mayor believe that’s not nearly enough?
The migrant crisis fueled by President Biden’s outrageous open border often doubled the number of people needing shelter, food and other necessities, with upwards of 140,000 people sleeping in city facilities during the height of the crisis.
Against that backdrop, Mamdani’s promises sound like so much pie in the sky. He pledged to “triple the City’s production of publicly-subsidized, affordable, union-built, rent-stabilized homes — creating 200,000 new units over the next 10 years.”
He also promised to spend $100 billion to preserve “the homes of existing public housing tenants.”
It’s all very easy to say.
The doing will be very, very difficult.