A report from the New York Times details how New York City, under a program started by Mayor Eric Adams, is hospitalizing the homeless that fall under the “basic needs” standard. This is a significant change from past policies that argued that anyone had the right to remain on the streets no matter his condition — as long as the individual denied care, there was nothing that the city or nonprofits could do to provide him with the medications or therapies necessary, even for addiction or serious mental-health issues.
Andy Newman writes for the Times:
As American cities struggle to turn back a rising tide of homelessness, New York is part of a broader movement to reconsider longer psychiatric hospital stays, half a century after mental institutions that had become brutal warehouses of humanity were emptied but never replaced with a coherent system of care.
Alex V. Barnard, a New York University sociologist who studies psychiatric hospitalization, said that Mr. Adams was one of several prominent Democrats, including leaders in California and Oregon, seeking to “reframe coercion as compassion.”
With more than 3,000 homeless people on its streets and only 80 beds available for extended care, NYC’s program is the beginning of something that should have happened a long time ago. The Jordan Neely apprehension and death in the arms of a civilian shouldn’t have happened, because Jordan Neely should have been in a long-term care facility. That blue cities, fearing the ACLU while congratulating themselves for showing “compassion for the unhoused,” have allowed squalor to pool in their downtowns and residential streets is unconscionable — everyone suffers. And it has taken too much of that suffering to start a pilot program such as New York’s.
Addicts and the severely mentally ill do not have a right to endanger themselves or others in public places. May this positive example from the Empire State convince others like them to try the middle ground between anarchy and mandated institutionalization — there’s quite a lot of real estate between the two that would do everyone a heap of good.