“Go look at other cities,” Mayor Eric Adams warns of Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s plans to quit breaking up homeless encampments — and LA’s MacArthur Park would be a great place to start.
Once enjoyed by the mostly working-class, Latino community surrounding it, the park is now a dangerous, fentanyl-plagued drug den, where homeless gather from far and wide to shoot up, light up, pass out — and often overdose.
If the city provides sufficient assistance, Mamdani argues, it won’t have to break up homeless camps.
Hmm: LA City Councilwoman Eunisses Hernandez (a Democratic Socialist, as it happens) has ensured that a city-funded nonprofit hands out free food, crack-smoking supplies and fresh needles to MacArthur’s homeless; critics credibly argue that’s why they’ve taken over the park.
That is: Giving people the gear they need to keep doing drugs encourages them to keep doing drugs.
Not that you need to go out west to see that: Gotham’s own two “overdose prevention centers,” supposedly safe places to shoot up, have rushed dozens of “clients” to emergency rooms, with at least two fatalities.
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Even if Mamdani’s plan doesn’t (yet) include handing out free supplies to junkies, allowing homeless camps to set up shop permanently across the city will eventually result in the same horrifying scenes.
Which New York City parks will Mamdani let the homeless colonize?
Prospect Park, where stroller-pushing Park Slope parents take their toddlers daily?
How about Pelham Bay Park, a natural beauty in The Bronx?
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Or Flushing Meadows, the home of the US Open?
Will he invite the hoards of drug-using homeless to his new home’s front steps at Carl Schurz Park?
Van Cortland? Greenbelt? Tompkins Square?
All of them?
Adams warned the city will see “idealism colliding with realism” if Mamdani sticks to his vow to leave the camps alone; sadly, the new mayor’s transition team seems to resemble the privileged NYU students who miss the homeless drug addicts recently cleared from Washington Square Park, even as permanent residents cheer.
The idea that bottomless aid and endless permissiveness will heal all society’s ills is pure fantasy — and if Mamdani governs on that basis, losing Gotham’s precious public green spaces to dangerous dysfunction won’t be his only disaster.