New York City is the midst of a prolonged cold snap, with 10 individuals reportedly frozen to death since Saturday.
Details remain murky. but more than half of the deceased are confirmed to have had a past experience with homelessness.
But it’s not just the weather that’s to blame.
These tragedies also highlight the dreadful consequences of bad policy, specifically Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s decision to stand down on homeless sweeps.
Early last month, the then-mayor elect announced that his administration would not break up encampments.
He argued that doing so was ineffective and uncaring.
Mamdani’s “Housing First” policy, by contrast, would realize the best of all possible worlds, providing homeless people with no-strings-attached permanent housing.
Subsidized rents will succeed where, supposedly, cops fail.
With homelessness policy, there is no more classic pathology than tolerating life-threatening behavior in the name of compassion. How is being forced into a shelter worse than dying in the cold?
Typical estimates find that homeless Americans live about two decades shorter than the non-homeless.
Rough sleeping poses many serious threats, including rape, assault and getting hit by a car.
Many advocates denounce encampment sweeps because of sanitation workers’ supposed callousness in handling street homeless individuals’ cherished possessions — but garden-variety theft, often perpetrated by other street homeless individuals, is a much greater risk to personal property.
New York City grants a right to shelter on demand more generous than any other city in the nation.
It therefore has less an of excuse than any city in the nation for tolerating encampments.
Advocates and the unsheltered themselves claim that shelters are unsafe, but practically any situation is safer than the streets.
As horrific as this January’s body count has been, much worse will come as the weather improves.
Warmer climates attract much more casual homelessness — a lesson West Coast communities had to learn the hard way.
But they did: California Democrats have recently been tacking to the center on street homelessness.
Mamdani is out of step with prevailing trends in his party.
You don’t win a competitive primary and general mayoral election without real political chops, but Mayor Mamdani needs to understand that, even in deep blue New York, encampments are very bad politics.
That’s evident from polling and the tens of thousands of 311 encampment complaints the public registers every year.
Bill de Blasio understood that the price of keeping everyone focused on income inequality and pre-K — his stuff — was holding the line on street disorder.
Accordingly, his administration did hundreds of sweeps yearly.
De Blasio also built heaps of housing, as has every other modern mayor.
In his invocation of “Housing First,” Mamdani apparently assumes New Yorkers will forget that recent history, or be fooled into believing that this time it’ll be different.
New York City is the affordable housing capital of America. If there is a social problem that can be dealt with by subsidized housing alone, be sure New York would have dealt with that years ago.
New York certainly cannot house its way out of homelessness.
Housing First has been extensively evaluated. It does not reliably reduce homelessness at the community level.
Building housing for the homeless is expensive (since the tenants have scant income to contribute to the rent) and difficult to site (which slows down the rate of production, even when money’s available).
It can’t be done overnight, and shouldn’t be, if we care about building quality programs.
If homelessness policymaking is to be sane, housing and enforcement must complement each other.
The optimist’s take on Mamdani is that he understands the need for trade-offs and will be free to do centrist things because, thanks to his socialist roots, he can’t be outflanked to his left.
So far, though, that remains faith-based punditry.
There’s nothing centrist or warmhearted about accommodating encampments.
Stephen Eide is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
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