Mayor Bill de Blasio’s failure on the homeless has taken a new, toxic turn in the coronavirus crisis, as they’ve taken over the subways — boosting risks to front-line workers and themselves.
Tuesday, Hizzoner seemed to bend, after videos and reports highlighted the horror on the trains, and a Post column by NYC Transit boss Sarah Feinberg blasted the city for not providing homeless services in the subway: De Blasio offered 200 beds and asked the MTA to close 10 terminals so cops and workers could clear out vagrants and clean the stations.
The agency nixed the closures as unworkable, but it’s progress of a sort: The mayor had been denying the system was “out of control.” But it’s not enough, as City Hall still refuses to embrace tough love.
Even now, mass transit is key to keeping the city running. MTA workers, cops, doctors, nurses (the very people needed to fight the virus and care for the sick) depend on it.
Yet the subways are now filthy, disgusting, unsanitary mobile shelters, with passed-out derelicts, druggies and the mentally ill sprawled out on seats and floors and using trains as toilets. The disease risk is huge.
Crime has also swelled. Workers filed over 300 “unruly person” reports in the first three weeks of April, on a level with past years, though ridership’s down 90 percent. Robberies last month shot up 55 percent over March 2019.
Yet de Blasio pretends to be helpless, wailing that the city has no “magical” way to move homeless into social-service programs. It’s the same excuse he’s used for years as homelessness has soared — denying his duty to enforce basic standards in public spaces.
Sorry, the city can’t rely on persuasion here: Sure, have social-services teams in support, but direct the NYPD to clear them out.
And if homeless czar Steven Banks — who’s spent much of his life fighting for the right of the homeless to seize those same public areas — balks, fire him.
Get these people off the trains — or it’s goodbye New York.
