© AP
NEW INDIGENTS
The municipal authorities of New York they plan to remove shantytown homeless encampments from city streets, mirroring similar efforts in other liberal cities that had previously tolerated shelters.
Mayor Eric Adams He revealed the plans in an interview with The New York Times on Friday, but provided few details. The announcement comes a month following Adams launched a campaign to remove the homeless from the sprawling network of subway stations in response to assaults and other violent acts.
“We’re going to get the encampments off our streets and we’re going to put people in healthy living conditions with general services,” he told the Times.
“I’m going to ask the city agencies to do a block-by-block, district-by-district analysis, identify where the encampments are, and then come up with a plan to serve the people who are in the encampments and to dismantle those encampments.”
Adams did not say where the homeless would go, and acknowledged that officials cannot force someone to go to a hospice. He said that he expected the management to start in a couple of weeks.
“We cannot legally prevent an individual from sleeping on the street and we are not going to break the law,” he said. “But you can’t build a miniature house out of cardboard on the street. That is inhumane.”
In its most recent estimate, in January 2021, the city said that some 1,100 people were living in parks and on the streets — a number activists consider insufficient. Most of the 50,000 homeless people in New York stay overnight in shelters.
