In amazing fit of gall, the Coalition for the Homeless has slammed Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul for “poor planning, misguided strategies, underinvestment in proven solutions and bureaucratic ineptitude,” as if that’s why the city shelter system is on the verge of collapse.
No, it’s the roughly 2,000 “asylum seekers” still landing here each week. These illegal migrants are why the shelter population has roughly doubled, to over 100,000.
Yes, City Hall’s fumbled for solutions, but we’re pretty sure the Coalition for the Homeless didn’t warn that this was coming when President Joe Biden opened the southern border.
As for any failure of planning: One of the Coalition’s tightest allies was running city homeless policy for eight years before Adams took over. If Steve Banks left behind a scheme to double the city’s shelter capacity in some emergency, it was very well hidden.
No, what really has the Coalition worried is that this crisis just might force the city to reopen the Callahan consent decree that gives the nonprofit so much power and profit.
New York City’s “right to shelter” rests purely on court settlements with advocates like the Coalition, which itself then collects taxpayer cash to satisfy the resulting requirements. It recently won another $714,000 contract to provide supportive housing for homeless with mental health and/or drug-abuse issues.
Yet this approach has only brought the city an ever-growing problem: The first lawsuit back in 1979 demanded the taxpayers provide just 750 beds.
If the migrant crisis has any ghost of a silver lining, it’s that it could force the political elite to finally rethink an approach that for more than six decades has fueled growing miserly and failure, as well as a huge social-service “nonprofit” industry plagued with corruption.
At the very least, it should expose the Coalition for the Homeless as a central part of the problem.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
