NEW YORK (AP) — New York City Mayor Eric Adams is making an aggressive push to try to remove homeless people from the city’s sprawling subway system, announcing a plan to start barring people from sleeping on trains or riding the same lines all night.
The new mayor, at one point likening homelessness to a “cancerous sore,” said Friday that the city next week would deploy more teams of police officers and mental health workers to the transit network and start enforcing rules more strictly.
“People tell me about their fear of using the system and we are going to ensure that fear is not New York’s reality,” Adams said.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, who joined Adams at a subway station Friday to make the announcement, said the city and state can’t recover from the devastation of the pandemic until people return to their jobs — and ride the subway to get there.
She said the state was working to get more psychiatric beds at hospitals available by increasing the amount of money hospitals receive for having the beds.
“We know it’s a big problem. But shame on us if this moment in time, if we don’t turn over every single stone, find every possible way to deal with this,” Hochul said.
Adams, a former New York City Police captain and transit officer who once patrolled the subterranean trains, said the vast majority of unhoused people are not dangerous. But the pandemic has exacerbated the issue, with more people dealing with job loss and untreated medical and mental health issues, and some of those people are dangerous to themselves and the public.
Adams called it a complex problem, saying “You can’t put a band-aid on a cancerous sore,” but, “You must remove the cancer and start the healing process.”
Shelly Nortz, the deputy executive director for policy at the Coalition for the Homeless, called the mayor’s comment “sickening” and said “criminalizing homelessness” was not the answer.
“Repeating the failed outreach-based policing strategies of the past will not end the suffering of homeless people bedding down on the subway. It is sickening to hear Mayor Adams liken unsheltered homeless people to a cancer. They are human beings,” Nortz said.
As subway ridership cratered during the pandemic, homeless people have become more visible, sometimes sleeping on platforms or several seats on a train, something the mayor has said contributes to a general feeling of “disorder” in the nations’ largest city.
In addition to the tens of thousands of people who sleep in the city’s shelter systems, there are uncounted thousands of people sleeping on the city’s streets and sometimes subway stations and trains.