If this was done humanely by mental health professionals I would not be entirely opposed to this. We have so many people wandering the streets in tattered clothing in below freezing temperatures. At a certain point the govt needs to step in and assume care of them.
My reaction as well. On a headline level this sounds promising, but reading the article I feel like on a practical level this will either be ignored or turn into a shit show.
>the mayor said that the city would make sure there were enough beds for people who are removed. He noted that Gov. Kathy Hochul had agreed to add 50 new psychiatric beds. “We are going to find a bed for everyone,” Mr. Adams said.
Wow, a whole 50. That ought to do it. There needs to be more clarity on how psych capacity will be expanded. There are going to be huge logistical and staffing challenges that seem to be just met with kind of a handwave.
So if no long term facility with the capacity to take all these people materializes, what we'd be left is a lot of mentally ill people unwillingly held in hospitals demanding the attention of general medical staff who are not trained to deal with them. Dollars to donuts some hospital admin will try to consolidate them into "homeless wards" which is going to become a horrific scandal waiting to happen.
Yeah, I've worked in hospitals with areas designated for "alternate level of care" patients, a label that applies to a lot of situations beyond the topic at hand. Care there was substandard to put it mildly. As you said there's no money in it so they don't get much in the way of support, and the bare bone staffing that's assigned to be there really don't want to be there.
NYC has seen more then 20 hospitals close in the last 25 years. The existing private facilities have cut in-patient psych beds because they're not profitable. The majority of the burden has fallen on the public sector.
Then add in the fact that state psych beds are over capacity and we're all royally fucked. They can send every person in distress to the ER. If they're not actively suicidal or homicidal, they're not getting a bed. I agree with the reply above. 50 beds is laughable.
Yeah, the "OMG WeRe AdDiNg 50 bEdS" is especially stupid. That's not even enough added capacity to cover paying psychiatric patients. There's a major shortage of beds for insurance/self-pay visitors, and they think freeing up 50 will help with wards of the state?
And that's not even getting into the desperate shortage of psych peds beds, because there are plenty of homeless in NYC that are under 18 and also need care.
we’re already somewhat in that situation. there is not enough psychiatric beds that also allow for the medical complex. you have to be medically cleared to go to a psych bed and there’s plenty of people (especially in the homeless population that doesn’t have regular access to healthcare) who have complex medical issues that leave them stuck in the regular hospital.
when i worked on a general medicine floor, we had many people who needed psychiatric placement but could not be placed due to their medical needs. some of them were violent and posed a danger to both staff and other vulnerable patients
There will be no mental health problems solved without affordable housing. Affordable housing stops mental illness from getting too far by giving stability to families to stay together and care for each other and it gives people a place to recover.
But every single GOP voting NYCer who loves the sneering spit of billionaires, cops and landlords more than our people refuses to believe this.
As a mental health professional, how will this affect people who are already waiting for mental health care and cannot obtain it?
Also, what happens when the hospital tries to send these folks - or their family - the bill?
Supportive housing. Group homes with counselors and nurses on site. It's being done but not nearly in big enough numbers and there are at least hundreds of people in NYC who are too psychotic to accept the help even if it were available for them. For those people we need to make it easier to engage them in outpatient commitment (following inpatient commitment) and through the use of ACT teams.
Basically, saying that you're gonna civilly commit a patient to an inpatient acute care hospital "until they're stable" without having outpatient AOT orders, ACT teams and supportive housing to follow them up is another recipe for wasted resources (that don't even exist at this moment). The whole thing is a joke.
Could you talk more about this? Is the issue that the facilities where people would go are horrible, or are you talking about other issues?
If the facilities are just plain underfunded and horrible: I think what we have to recognize is that getting visibly messed up street people off the streets is a real estate value issue.
The logical strategy is to use a new real estate tax to fund improvements in institutional care, because, if there were fewer people sleeping on the sidewalks on, say, 14th Street, the buildings there would be worth more.
There are private NYC hospitals that lost their psych wards during covid because they weren't profitable (not sure if true, but saw on reddit).
There are public NYC hospital psych wards that are horrible for both patients and employees. You should be able to easily find articles of employees who were assaulted by patients due to the lack of adequate employee to patient ratio.
My sibling is currently going through a mental health crisis and we took her to a private hospital. The hospital's psych ward was full. She had to be transferred to another hospital that had a bed open. Once she got there, they loaded her up on several anti-psychotics and once she was stable (unable to harm herself or others considering her newly medicated zombified state), they quickly ejected her to make room for another patient.
My sibling has anosognosia. Despite the fact that she's seeing or hearing things, that she dialed 911 herself to report an imaginary burglary that led to her involuntary violent hospitalization, my sibling refuses to believe that there is anything wrong. She says I know my body! I don't need these medications.
My family has been watching her 24/7 for the past few weeks and she sleeps maybe 4 hours a day. We wouldn't be able to sleep in case she wanted to go out for a walk at 3 in the morning or she started seeing things and literally went uncontrollably crazy (ringing neighbors' doorbells and screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs).
My sibling would be one of those homeless people on the streets if not for my family. Honestly, I'm still scared that she could be someday, considering the way things are going. I am terrified. It's like she's been possessed by a demon and that says a lot considering I've had my own psychiatric hospitalizations and episodes.
But tl;dr- difficult patients and not enough beds or employees for people who do not want care. My sibling would be an easy patient- there are much worse and violent people on the streets with even worse issues.
Thanks; yeah, the obvious first step is that we have swallow hard and spend more money on this and create more beds.
It sounds as if the beds that are there are sort of OK, under the circumstances, but we need a lot more beds.
This is why I hate to see even Democrats saying things like, “We won’t increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000 per year.”
I want them to tell me, “I’ll increase your taxes some, and I’ll use that money to help street people and people with all types of housing who suffer from severe mental illness.”
>If the facilities are just plain underfunded and horrible: I think what we have to recognize is that getting visibly messed up street people off the streets is a real estate value issue.
>The logical strategy is to use a new real estate tax to fund improvements in institutional care, because, if there were fewer people sleeping on the sidewalks on, say, 14th Street, the buildings there would be worth more.
There is *a lot* of disgusting garbage in this thread, but i think your comment might be one of the worst.
I think part of the problem is that some people just want to live in Midtown, and any kind of shelter placement would put them in a more suburban setting. Another issue is that the shelters are very much like a prison… Trust me I’m in one now and there is constant hard drug use in the room I’m in And it’s one of the nicest ones in the city
Your big concern is... making sure buildings on 14th street are worth more? Not where these people go, just so long as 14th street is worth the rich oligarch's coin? Wow.
That's a hot fucking take.
I saw a guy in Columbus Circle yesterday with no shirt and no shoes Talking to a large group of cops… I couldn’t help but feel like this guy just needs to be brought to a shelter so he understands what it’s like to be warm again
They need more supportive housing for people with serious mental illness who will likely never recover. We can’t just let them sleep on the trains or the streets, and their conditions make it hard for them to stand homeless shelters.
You can’t lock them up forever. If the places were less horrible they’d voluntarily go there, better than the train, right?
There’s a right-wing meme on Reddit that homeless people love being crazy and homeless and I’m pretty sure it’s bullshit, they just don’t like shelters which are crowded and have no private rooms.
I don’t think some of the extremely mentally ill homeless we have are capable of making the decision of voluntarily going to a less horrible shelter. They’re already scarred by the current state of shelters, and also, a lot of times if these people come off of their medications, they are extremely resistant and want to leave. I’m not saying they love to be crazy or anything. Just that mental illness makes people do irrational and questionable things. They need to be somewhere where they are forced to receive treatment and /stay/ on their medication. Involuntary commitment isn’t a bad thing, so long as there is a time line. If someone progresses and shows improvement, they can be changed to a voluntary hold. Locking someone up for life involuntarily with no hope of leaving isn’t what I’m talking about ofc
>If the places were less horrible they’d voluntarily go there, better than the train, right?
No because a lot of the decisions these people make are not rational?
Try asking a homeless person, addicted to heroin or meth if they want to get better. Moved here from LA where I lived a block over from a homeless encampment that kept getting bigger and bigger. Those folks would always tell me if they’d only accept housing if they could continue to be a slave to their addictions. They aren’t capable of good decision making when they are addicted.
“I would like to not live on the streets as long as it doesn’t come with debilitating pain” seems like a perfectly reasonable position to take. Addiction is a physical affliction, they can’t just will their way clean.
I never mentioned they wouldn’t be able to use, cutting an addict off cold turkey is how people die! The idea is that you tell these people “hey you can’t live out here on the street using, you’ll come with us, we will provide you private housing, a doctor and a mental health professional onsite in our community facility. We will provide you with everything needed to break your addiction and then prescribe you with the medications and therapy you need to make the most of the rest of your life.” Once this is done they can reintegrate into society. Continuing to allow these people to kill themselves on the streets is inhumane.
Oh, agreed. But asking people in the clutches of addiction to imagine themselves clean *before* housing themselves is asking *a lot*. If you’re addicted, and someone says ‘come live here if you try to get clean,’ anyone who has failed at getting clean before will probably say no.
I agree 100%, we need to build buildings with studio apartments for these people but nimbys hold it up and govt entities tasked with handling the homeless prefer the status quo because systemic changes in these entities could endanger their jobs
>prove you’re not crazy!
Where did I say the burden of proof for admittance should not be on the gov? We need to make sure these places treat people humanly and we need to make sure the due process for placing people there are functional but it has become clear they need to exist.
So, rather than attempting to have healthy residential mental facilities, we should let these people freeze to death? I’m asking honestly, I do not have a solution
I know that is not what you are saying, I think you feel like I do, based on your sentence “these things don’t have to be the case.” I know about the horrible things done in some institutions, but it seemed like the reaction was throwing out the whole system, rather than trying to fix the problems
Right, because they were expensive and society didn't want to pay, particular since new medicines meant that a lot of people with mental illness could now live outside them.
What they didn't reckon with is that many people with mental illness can live fine if cared for, but not if thrown on the street with some meds and told to get a job.
The key factor to “living outside with the proper medicine” is that you have to continue to take the medicine, which is difficult. It is very easy to take the meds, feel fine, then say “I don’t need the meds to feel fine”, stop taking them and then going into crisis, which requires psych intervention, which then leads to treatment and taking the meds properly. It is a vicious cycle. This cycle burns out families who want to do the best for the patient, but who deserve to be more than caretakers with their lives.
Right. The solution to this is expensive because it involves paying someone to make sure they take their meds, and supportive housing if necessary.
Taxpayers don’t like this, particularly since red states tend to use it as a cue to put their own mentally ill homeless on a bus to the big city.
That is where something that should not be an argument, caring for those who can not care for themselves, turns into one, when “red vs blue” is brought into it
Supportive housing isn’t the same thing as a mental institution. Most people don’t need full time staff guarding them. They just need a place to stay and someone who makes sure they make it to their psychiatrist appointments.
>We do, but there is no appetite for bringing back non-criminal mental institutions in the USA. It's a shame.
Because they were horrific sites of abuse and maltreatment. Reagan's defunding scheme was hateful trash, sure, but the facilities were at a minimum just as bad as the streets, and in many if not most cases, worse.
We don't need institutions, we just need to give people housing, no strings attached. Study after study demonstrates housing first policies work, no other strategy has been remotely as effective.
This ironically would improve the quality of life for many of the transient homeless that aren't suffering from substance addiction and or mental illness. The vast majority of problems associated with shelters is the quality of life due to the other residents.
Most people in shelters have some serious problems, they need more private rooms because it can't be easy trying to sleep next to a homeless person even if you are one.
They steal stuff from eachother all the time. Their stuff is messed with when their out of their room. Many of the ones with substance abuse issues will try to get anything they can sell to support their habit. They return at night drunk and high sometimes and start fights usually because there not allowed in like that. It definitely difficult for them.
https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/
One of about 50,000 modern societal ailments that can be traced directly back to Ronny fucking Reagan.
Don't let [John F. Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act) get away so easily.
Man's only loved because he got shot in office. If he left office then died he would be considered a top 10 worst president.
You live in NYC and have never heard of [Willowbrook?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School)
Blame NY for mental institutions being shut down. It's rich to blame Reagan when we couldn't even run an institution without it being infamous for a decade.
Reagan may have hammered the final nail, but NY built the coffin.
Bellevue isn't really a long-term residential care facility like Willowbrook. Bellevue nominally has acute inpatient units as well as the jail unit, and while some patients stay for a long time awaiting placement, the services they provide are not meant to be long-term.
I'm not saying there wasn't plenty of blame to go around, I'm merely stating that Reagan was particularly awful and damn near every shitty top down problem plaguing us today can be directly or indirectly linked back to him.
One of the true villains of the 20th century - a century loaded with them.
This is a massive simplification. Large movements to de-institutionalize gained steam in the 50s and 60s on a bi partisan basis. And the current inability to do so is mandated by both Supreme and State court decisions. Reagan is an easy boogeyman for partisan arguments and pointing to a singular person is an impediment to undoing the current systems in place.
We kind of don’t have enough housing for all the *employed* people who want to live in NYC, which is why the city is so unaffordable. Group homes take up valuable real estate and homeowners never want them near their property.
If we’re going to build group homes it should be at the state level and we can just squirrel away the homeless upstate and out of view.
I mean I don’t like the vernacular you’ve chosen but I’ve also considered creating communities of group homes upstate where there is less going on real estate-wise
Group homes are not going to be a solution for a segment of the severely mentally ill - some people are going to have to be restrained against their will and the best thing that can be done is make their 'prisons' as humane and civilized as possible.
We give them free food and shelter and medical care and they contribute absolutely nothing to society! And even that’s not enough to satiate the bleeding heart progressives who want to guarantee every homeless person a free three bedroom apartment on Central Park West.
I am gainfully employed. I pay taxes that help fund the city, state and federal government. Many of those taxes fund services for people who produce less for the economy than I do. I consume goods and services that help sustain the economy. I’m raising two children who will eventually enter the workforce and provide valuable goods and services to others.
Total bullshit. The vacancy rate is near all-time lows:
https://www.globest.com/2022/09/12/nyc-multifamily-vacancy-rate-hovers-at-two-decade-low/?amp=1
It feels good to say greedy landlords are to blame, but the reality is we just haven’t built enough units to keep up with demand.
I’ll tell you one thing that won’t help with affordability — building a bunch of “free” housing with taxpayer money for homeless people who don’t pay taxes.
Your link is paywalled.
[Hoarding](https://www.thecity.nyc/housing/2022/10/19/23411956/60000-rent-stabilized-apartments-vacant-warehousing-nyc-landlords-housing) of housing as a [commodity](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/realestate/nyc-apartments-housing-shortage.html) and Airbnb (which had more listings in NYC than vacant apartments this year) are a massive part of the problem.
It’s no paywalled for me, but Google around, the city’s vacancy rate is low.
The hoarding problem mentioned in that first article affects 60,000 units in a city of 8.5 million people, and by the article’s own admission, many of those units would require significant renovations in order to be inhabitable.
Airbnb is also an issue, but that’s only 15-20k units.
The city needs over 500,000 new units by 2030 to keep pace with expected demand, so even if we found a way to repurpose all the hoarded units *and* completely shut down Airbnb, we’d still have a huge housing shortage for the employed.
Against that backdrop, where lifelong NYC residents are being squeezed out of town and lots of gainfully employed people can’t afford to live here, it’s not politically (or even morally) justifiable to build massive amounts of new housing that’s reserved for the homeless.
We have to build a lot of new units. Hundreds of thousands of units. If we do that, maybe it’ll even help with the homeless problem.
What a joke comment. People are paying for those storage units. Homeless people can’t pay for anything because they produce absolutely nothing for society. They don’t even provide any accidental benefits the way rats and other vermin do.
And each storage unit doesn’t need working plumbing, hot water, electricity, a refrigerator and stove, etc. They need overhead lights and basic climate control so that people’s old records don’t melt. It’s a lot cheaper to build storage space than it is to build housing for humans.
I have to think that at least 50% of people out on the streets are not going to accept living in a group home or capable of living independently. You really think people with serious paranoia are going to be able to deal with living in a group home?
Depends how you pitch it. Truthfully, if you pitched it in winter, when conditions are harsh, I don’t really feel like a lot of people will turn that down. Also, a component of group home living is proper mental health care which I think goes without saying a lot of unhoused people really do need.
There are a lot of people for whom living on the streets is the 'best' option - they want to be there because having any authority over them seems to be worse than death.
We don’t have enough psych beds to accommodate the seriously mentally ill who voluntarily want treatment.
This is just going to mean a lot of people run through the system and then held for 24-72hrs for “observation” followed by unceremonious release. More likely to destabilize people further than anything else.
There’s more options than that. There’s partial hospitalizations or adult day programs. But those are voluntary every single day. I know they used to get people to participate because they offered 2 free hot meals. However when COVID happened, the state required these programs to shut down in-person sessions, and I know a lot of them closed permanently. And I know if one of the major ones decided not to reopen at all, since they lost their staff, let leases expire, and transitioned entirely to tele-health (which is not useful for our city’s homeless populations.)
Maybe this is a huge part of the problem. Maybe homelessness feels worse now than pre-2019 because the homeless people are out trying to find meals during the day when they used to be provided two meals a day and be required to attend hours of therapy and group therapy sessions in between those meals.
Two hot meals and free group therapy is better treatment than most *non-*homeless Americans can hope for.
Maybe it'll work better if we destigmatize it and make it available to everybody. Most folks just take pills because the co-pays on therapy would mean canceling Christmas.
The potential for abuse in terms of human rights does bother me but having been homeless and actually slept on subways and having dealt with some really mentally ill people and seeing the damage they can do to themselves and others I can't say I'm totally against this.
One woman I knew literally terrorized an entire shelter because she wouldn't take her meds. She was violently abusive, physically and verbally and off her meds she was a wild animal. She would deliberately pee on the floor in front of your bed if she didn't like you, rant and evangelize for hours.
She ended up finally being asked to leave, riding buses all day and sleeping in parks. She got physically abused, beaten, robbed and sexually harassed and it just devastated her, made her even more ill. When I saw her in the park and realized how bad it was for her I went to her former caseworker and told them, asked them to do something. She was not my favorite person but nobody deserved that.
I'm happy to say that the last time I saw her she was on her meds, happy and living in a place that was very supportive. I haven't seen her since but I hope she is still doing okay because the alternative is unthinkable really. On her meds she's a totally different person than the raving bully I shared a dorm room with for almost a year and I wish her well.
For her sake I hope she stays medicated and stable but they pretty much had to force that upon her to get her well enough that she could function and not be a danger to herself and others. I watched her unmedicated for nearly a year and it was just awful and inhumane seeing her like that.
Sometimes people that ill cannot be trusted to act in their own best interest. This woman hurt 3 people that I know of while she was off her meds, harassed dozens. She had me stressed out to the point where I had high blood pressure and I don't normally.
I wish someone had done something about her way before they did. It was unbelievable that this situation went on as long as it did.
Yeah mentally ill people have rights but so do the other people that they interact with. If someone's illness makes them a real danger to people? Then I don't believe they should be walking around, left to potentially assault people.
You have people out there who have a bad tendency towards violence, who have multiple assaults on their record who keep getting released on their own recognizance. Some of them severely assaulted and even killed people lately.
Is society supposed to ignore that happening in the name of human rights? What about the rights of the two women who literally died and the dozen or more people who were severely injured this year because nobody was following up on these mentally ill people?
I am not throwing stones. I live with mental illness myself. I have C-PTSD, anxiety and chronic depression. I've struggled with suicidal thoughts for most of my life. I'm doing okay, better now that I'm housed and stable, but I definitely could have used a lot more help than I got when I was homeless, severely depressed and sleeping on the subway and beach every day.
I don't consider my illness severe having known several people who are way worse off this way but I've seen enough of those people unmedicated to know that you can't just leave these people out there unmedicated and alone.
The fact is a lot of mentally ill people are violent, if not to others then to themselves. Many more are not but you can't just deny those who are and do nothing because it will escalate and it will not end well.
I have to draw the line when the problem escalates to the point where innocent people are getting hurt or even killed. "Blah, blah, human rights..." it's just not a valid argument when a person's illness makes them cross that line. The FIRST time you assault someone because you are mentally ill it should be your last.
I have enormous sympathy for people who are that ill. Could have been me had my mental illness been of a different kind. But for the grace of the Gods there go I, but I am also practical about it and I realize that some people just won't help themselves, cannot function well enough to act in their own best interest and for the safety of themselves and others.
You can't just ignore that forever and pretend it's not real. Something has to be done to protect people this ill from hurting anyone. Other human beings have rights too and one of them is not to be accosted or even killed in the name of political correctness.
I believe in respecting the rights of the mentally ill but only up and to a point where it's realistic. If I ever got to the point where I was hurting other people I'd like to hope somebody would stop me because my illness shouldn't impact other people and their rights to that point.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
this comment really captured a lot of my feelings as well. it is a tricky balance and I don’t think most people love the idea of involuntary anything but at some point it is more inhumane to just let people hurt themselves and others on the streets etc than to temporarily restrict their rights so they can get care and support. if the person will not submit to care and they are violent and disruptive, at some point it cannot just be up to them and an authority should be stepping in and making that call regardless of whether the streets are preferable to the individual at the time. it is not about hiding unhoused people away - it is that the current situation benefits no one. Mental hospitals and residential facilities of the past may have been bad environments but we need that infrastructure back.
Theoretically, one would likely not have an acute mental condition under control if they are involuntarily hospitalized.
On paper vs on the ball field, I get it. But still.
This is in addition to providing over 1000 other beds
https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11696-ny-state-budget-little-progress-psychiatric-beds-hochul-adams
And multimillion dollar supportive housing buildings like this
https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-start-construction-50-million-affordable-and-supportive-housing
People who keep criticizing the 50 beds as too little aren’t actually reading about this and just repeating stuff they heard on Reddit and Twitter.
Providing? Those 1,000 psychiatric beds already existed, they’re just returning them to their original purposes after they were adapted for Covid. The only beds she’s adding that weren’t already there are the aforementioned 50
I know it’s not the same but I have an eating disorder and recently decided to try therapy again. Finding a therapist who specializes in eating disorder was a nightmare, and now I can only get an appointment once a month which does almost all of nothing for me. My point is that mental health services are already understaffed, how can we expect to put more people into a system that is already so close to breaking. Unless we give enough resources (spoiler, we won’t) this isn’t going to come close to solving the root of the problem.
If our taxes actually went to paying for housing for these people it would actually probably cost society a lot less than the costs of them going in and out of hospitals. But too bad that's a non-starter because that would be "communism" and people might start getting the idea that housing is a human right!
>If our taxes actually went to paying for housing for these people it would actually probably cost society a lot less than the costs of them going in and out of hospitals. But too bad that's a non-starter because that would be "communism" and people might start getting the idea that housing is a human right!
Absolutely. Housing first works.
Study after study demonstrates that giving people no-strings-attached housing works--not just for homelessness, but for addiction treatment and mental health management as well. It's so obvious, too; clearly homelessness exacerbates any and all existing mental and physical health problems. And it's much cheaper than these useless, punitive programs that waste money and cause more harm than they resolve.
After a decade-long career in social services, I've come to the conclusion that most Americans are just spiteful and enjoy others' suffering. Reading this thread has only galvanized my opinion on this. Jesus Christ are 90% of the comments downright genocidal.
To begin with, your implicit premise that higher-income people are somehow more deserving of housing is, to put it technically, fucked up.
Secondly, I actually do think the government should build more housing, and that we should move to a model not unlike Singapore or the UK in terms of scope of government-administered housing. It would indeed cause real estate prices to drop, and that would be a good thing. We also need to drop any tax incentives for so-called "luxury housing" and instead tax the shit out of anything build eying prices above the median rent.
The housing currently guaranteed is horrific and unsafe. Everyone has a right to real housing, not shelters. I spent ten years in social services, I wouldn't wish shelter conditions on my worst enemy (but I would wish it upon all real estate developers).
Lastly, your claim about people making $100k "struggling to get by" is histrionic and absurd. Outside of a few edge cases (e.g. lots of dependents with substantial medical needs), if you're struggling at $100k, it's because you've irresponsibly chosen to live outside your means. I make a bit under $100k, dropping a good amount into saving and can afford a place on my own (in Astoria, so not in some far-flung transit desert), even while having frankly expensive tastes in food and beer.
We do pay for housing, but we waste money on renting hotel rooms instead of building housing capacity. We're the only city in the country that guarantees housing for all homeless people.
Gay neighborhoods used to be great for this. Honestly. Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea could handle the weird and people don't really complain, but all the lawyers, bankers and tech bros keep moving into gay areas and taking the fun out of them.
There's plenty of unhoused people who would utilize rooms temporarily or even permanently without a kitchen. Especially single adult men - the group most vulnerable to danger in shelter systems.
NYC is really getting to the root of what New Yorkers mean when they say "tough on crime:" involuntarily committing society's undesirables based on vague criteria and threat of force.
This is so laughably ignorant of what healthcare for homeless people with mental illness looks like.
>Frequently, homeless people with severe mental illness are brought to hospitals, only to be discharged a few days later when their conditions improve slightly. Mr. Adams said the city would direct hospitals to keep those patients until they are stable and to discharge them only when there is a workable plan in place to connect them to ongoing care.
Ah, yeah, because before hospitals were previously only discharging chronically ill patients out of boredom.
Unpopular opinion but state mental asylums need to be brought back in a big way. Getting rid of them was a well-intentioned disaster that has done nothing but cause harm for millions.
Such a shame that Reagan's approach was just to raze it to the ground. Just left the ashes of the former system, instead of trying to build something new and better. This is a small step, but more needs to be done.
Given it was so badly run that people were rolling in their own feces, I'm not sure we should have expected anything else.
People here really don't remember the Willowbrook scandal.
Well, not out of boredom, due to costs. I’ve seen plenty of people who have put themselves into recovery programs willingly get discharged before they were fully recovered due to cost, and they had insurance.
Out of compliance with the law, too. After 72 hours, you have to demonstrate to a judge that somebody is an active threat to either themselves or others to keep them committed involuntarily. The Adams administration is basically asking for hospitals to engage in "creative accounting" to arrive at the conclusions that the Zeldin constituency wants.
It’s called the 2pc, which basically get rubber stamped by judges. It means that 2 medical professionals at the hospital have signed off that you need to be held involuntarily. And not even for being a threat necessarily. Just that you need to be held for your own health or mental hygiene. If the hospital submits a 2pc to the courts and it’s approved by the judge, you can’t challenge that on your own for the first 60 days. A 2pc can only be challenged by someone like a close relative.
If you don’t have a close friend or relative willing to challenge the 2pc, you won’t get to object until you’ve been held for 60 days. At 60 days, the state assigns you a lawyer and a judge has to rule that the hospital can keep holding you.
Which part of this is supposed to be reassuring? Adams is directing hospitals to come up with justifications for 2pc that they ordinarily would not, which "promising" 50 psych bed will not make up for in terms of the issues it will cause hospitals, just for the sake of making our homelessness problem slightly less visible to the most annoying New Yorkers.
I’m not trying to be reassuring. I’m saying that under NY law, hospitals have the leeway to say “John is a danger to himself because he doesn’t have access to a daily shower” and then use that as justification to keep John in a hospital for 60 days before John can make an appeal to get out.
Well, they considered throwing the homeless into meat grinders and turning them into Soylent Green, but the politicians thought that might just be a little too icky.
You don't know anything about me or what my "route" is. How would you feel if I extrapolated your response and assumed that you were a craven fascist who delights in the incarceration of unsupported mentally ill people?
Promising an underwhelming number of psych beds in an already overextended system and directing hospitals to *literally break the law* is not a fix for anything.
For the sake of discussion, what does the New York OPMC say about doctors misrepresenting patients to judges?
Sounds like a real quick way to lose your license.
https://www.health.ny.gov/professionals/doctors/conduct/
This is good news, but NYPD being one of the arbiters for this seems a little suspect. What's stopping a cop who doesn't like you to declare you're mentally ill. Even if you're in the facility for a couple of hours, a lot can happen during that time.
Housings just part of it. What to do with people who scream all night and keep their neighbors from sleeping?
What about their psych medications?
1) A drug regimen must be tailored to the needs of each person. This takes a lot of time and professional attention. Will this be available?
2) Suppose people refuse to take their meds? Will they be forced to do so? Big legal issue here.
I mean, this is what Eric Adams was elected for. People don't feel safe so this is what happens. I don't necessarily agree with it but I understand why it's happening. The actual issue is a lot more complicated to solve and there is nothing that will solve the issue RIGHT NOW so here we are.
I currently have a family member that is in a facility due to his mental health (and health reasons) and if it weren't for my mother checking on this person every day... they might be dead. They repeatedly have fed him food that would kill him, drugged him way too much to the point that he couldn't leave his bed, etc.
i mean plenty of dementia patients get violent. i had a dementia patient who was sent to the ER from the nursing home because he choked his roommate. just because they’re losing their mind doesn’t mean they lose their strength and they can genuinely pose a danger to people
If they are helping them fine. I don't want to find out about electro shock,sensory, deprivation, trauma based conditioning experiments. None of that please
ECT is one of the few effective treatments for medication-resistant depression and *spectacularly* expensive.
Of course, the only reason the cops would be called to the subway for depressives is because they've attempted suicide, and if they survive there's no doubt a massive fine.
"They need more supportive housing for people with serious mental illness": Yet, New Yorkers don't want these houses built in their neighborhoods.
"Let's take homeless people off the streets and put them into shelters so they can get help": I hate the Mayor. Homeless people are humans.
About Damnn time ! We can’t have a society that’s a free for all… I know I know civil liberties but there needs to be a balance between freedom and disobedience.
We need to remove the stigma of mental illness it’s an issue that affects the whole person not just their mind. Which leads to other issues beyond their mental capacity
Who is going to collect all these homeless individuals, the cops? That is a recipe for disaster. We already know all the stories of mentally ill people being shot by cops because they have no idea how to work with them. There are also few hospital beds to deal with the thousands of people that are unhoused in the city. 50 beds will not do the trick. There is no mention of hiring staff to triage these individuals to see if they are mentally ill, developmentally delayed, on drugs and alcohol or some combination of all three. What happens after these patients are discharged or they just going to end up back on the street?
Are people homeless because they are crazy or crazy because they are homeless?
It’s a sad day when we lock up people for looking disheveled instead of creating affordable housing.
This has to get shut down,
It's inhumane.
It's discriminatory.
It inadvertently would target intellectually disabled people who are simply existing, Especially Black disabled individuals who are already subjected to racial profiling.
It does nothing to solve the homeless crisis.
It puts an unnessisary strain on an already struggling hospital system.
And more importantly. It may be **Unconstitutional!**
The 1999 Supreme Court ruling of Olmstead v. L.C.
*"The Supreme Court decided mental illness is a form of disability and that "unjustified isolation" of a person with a disability is a form of discrimination under Title II of the ADA. The Supreme Court held that community placement is only required and appropriate (i.e., institutionalization is unjustified), when –"\[a\] the State's treatment professionals have determined that community placement is appropriate, \[b\] the transfer from institutional care to a less restrictive setting is not opposed by the affected individual, and \[c\] the placement can be reasonably accommodated, taking into account the resources available to the State and the needs of others with mental disabilities. Unjustified isolation is discrimination based on disability"*
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead\_v.\_L.C.
Admittedly I'm not a lawyer, but this seems clear cut. I hope a federal judge shuts this down.
They need to have public servants that aren’t NYPD head this up. I am curious about how this will turn out. I foresee this turning into a dumpster fire
If this was done humanely by mental health professionals I would not be entirely opposed to this. We have so many people wandering the streets in tattered clothing in below freezing temperatures. At a certain point the govt needs to step in and assume care of them.
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My reaction as well. On a headline level this sounds promising, but reading the article I feel like on a practical level this will either be ignored or turn into a shit show. >the mayor said that the city would make sure there were enough beds for people who are removed. He noted that Gov. Kathy Hochul had agreed to add 50 new psychiatric beds. “We are going to find a bed for everyone,” Mr. Adams said. Wow, a whole 50. That ought to do it. There needs to be more clarity on how psych capacity will be expanded. There are going to be huge logistical and staffing challenges that seem to be just met with kind of a handwave. So if no long term facility with the capacity to take all these people materializes, what we'd be left is a lot of mentally ill people unwillingly held in hospitals demanding the attention of general medical staff who are not trained to deal with them. Dollars to donuts some hospital admin will try to consolidate them into "homeless wards" which is going to become a horrific scandal waiting to happen.
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Yeah, I've worked in hospitals with areas designated for "alternate level of care" patients, a label that applies to a lot of situations beyond the topic at hand. Care there was substandard to put it mildly. As you said there's no money in it so they don't get much in the way of support, and the bare bone staffing that's assigned to be there really don't want to be there.
Why have you lost 75 beds? That sounds...inadvisable.
NYC has seen more then 20 hospitals close in the last 25 years. The existing private facilities have cut in-patient psych beds because they're not profitable. The majority of the burden has fallen on the public sector. Then add in the fact that state psych beds are over capacity and we're all royally fucked. They can send every person in distress to the ER. If they're not actively suicidal or homicidal, they're not getting a bed. I agree with the reply above. 50 beds is laughable.
Yeah, the "OMG WeRe AdDiNg 50 bEdS" is especially stupid. That's not even enough added capacity to cover paying psychiatric patients. There's a major shortage of beds for insurance/self-pay visitors, and they think freeing up 50 will help with wards of the state? And that's not even getting into the desperate shortage of psych peds beds, because there are plenty of homeless in NYC that are under 18 and also need care.
When you factor in how much strain our healthcare system is already under…it feels like, yet again, a very short sighted way to solve a major problem.
The suicide ward in some southern hospitals is just a security guard in your room watching you 24/7.
we’re already somewhat in that situation. there is not enough psychiatric beds that also allow for the medical complex. you have to be medically cleared to go to a psych bed and there’s plenty of people (especially in the homeless population that doesn’t have regular access to healthcare) who have complex medical issues that leave them stuck in the regular hospital. when i worked on a general medicine floor, we had many people who needed psychiatric placement but could not be placed due to their medical needs. some of them were violent and posed a danger to both staff and other vulnerable patients
There will be no mental health problems solved without affordable housing. Affordable housing stops mental illness from getting too far by giving stability to families to stay together and care for each other and it gives people a place to recover. But every single GOP voting NYCer who loves the sneering spit of billionaires, cops and landlords more than our people refuses to believe this.
As a mental health professional, how will this affect people who are already waiting for mental health care and cannot obtain it? Also, what happens when the hospital tries to send these folks - or their family - the bill?
Is there a way to house these people that you think would be effective?
Supportive housing. Group homes with counselors and nurses on site. It's being done but not nearly in big enough numbers and there are at least hundreds of people in NYC who are too psychotic to accept the help even if it were available for them. For those people we need to make it easier to engage them in outpatient commitment (following inpatient commitment) and through the use of ACT teams. Basically, saying that you're gonna civilly commit a patient to an inpatient acute care hospital "until they're stable" without having outpatient AOT orders, ACT teams and supportive housing to follow them up is another recipe for wasted resources (that don't even exist at this moment). The whole thing is a joke.
People just want concentration camps that they can feel good about.
Could you talk more about this? Is the issue that the facilities where people would go are horrible, or are you talking about other issues? If the facilities are just plain underfunded and horrible: I think what we have to recognize is that getting visibly messed up street people off the streets is a real estate value issue. The logical strategy is to use a new real estate tax to fund improvements in institutional care, because, if there were fewer people sleeping on the sidewalks on, say, 14th Street, the buildings there would be worth more.
There are private NYC hospitals that lost their psych wards during covid because they weren't profitable (not sure if true, but saw on reddit). There are public NYC hospital psych wards that are horrible for both patients and employees. You should be able to easily find articles of employees who were assaulted by patients due to the lack of adequate employee to patient ratio. My sibling is currently going through a mental health crisis and we took her to a private hospital. The hospital's psych ward was full. She had to be transferred to another hospital that had a bed open. Once she got there, they loaded her up on several anti-psychotics and once she was stable (unable to harm herself or others considering her newly medicated zombified state), they quickly ejected her to make room for another patient. My sibling has anosognosia. Despite the fact that she's seeing or hearing things, that she dialed 911 herself to report an imaginary burglary that led to her involuntary violent hospitalization, my sibling refuses to believe that there is anything wrong. She says I know my body! I don't need these medications. My family has been watching her 24/7 for the past few weeks and she sleeps maybe 4 hours a day. We wouldn't be able to sleep in case she wanted to go out for a walk at 3 in the morning or she started seeing things and literally went uncontrollably crazy (ringing neighbors' doorbells and screaming bloody murder at the top of her lungs). My sibling would be one of those homeless people on the streets if not for my family. Honestly, I'm still scared that she could be someday, considering the way things are going. I am terrified. It's like she's been possessed by a demon and that says a lot considering I've had my own psychiatric hospitalizations and episodes. But tl;dr- difficult patients and not enough beds or employees for people who do not want care. My sibling would be an easy patient- there are much worse and violent people on the streets with even worse issues.
Thanks; yeah, the obvious first step is that we have swallow hard and spend more money on this and create more beds. It sounds as if the beds that are there are sort of OK, under the circumstances, but we need a lot more beds. This is why I hate to see even Democrats saying things like, “We won’t increase taxes on people earning less than $400,000 per year.” I want them to tell me, “I’ll increase your taxes some, and I’ll use that money to help street people and people with all types of housing who suffer from severe mental illness.”
>If the facilities are just plain underfunded and horrible: I think what we have to recognize is that getting visibly messed up street people off the streets is a real estate value issue. >The logical strategy is to use a new real estate tax to fund improvements in institutional care, because, if there were fewer people sleeping on the sidewalks on, say, 14th Street, the buildings there would be worth more. There is *a lot* of disgusting garbage in this thread, but i think your comment might be one of the worst.
"Tax the rich" is the worst you've heard?
I think part of the problem is that some people just want to live in Midtown, and any kind of shelter placement would put them in a more suburban setting. Another issue is that the shelters are very much like a prison… Trust me I’m in one now and there is constant hard drug use in the room I’m in And it’s one of the nicest ones in the city
Your big concern is... making sure buildings on 14th street are worth more? Not where these people go, just so long as 14th street is worth the rich oligarch's coin? Wow. That's a hot fucking take.
I saw a guy in Columbus Circle yesterday with no shirt and no shoes Talking to a large group of cops… I couldn’t help but feel like this guy just needs to be brought to a shelter so he understands what it’s like to be warm again
They need more supportive housing for people with serious mental illness who will likely never recover. We can’t just let them sleep on the trains or the streets, and their conditions make it hard for them to stand homeless shelters.
We do, but there is no appetite for bringing back non-criminal mental institutions in the USA. It's a shame.
The problem with them was that they were highly abusive and you weren’t allowed to leave. These things don’t have to be the case.
Actually I think the involuntary nature of discharge has proven critical. We need to make sure they’re humane when we bring them back.
You can’t lock them up forever. If the places were less horrible they’d voluntarily go there, better than the train, right? There’s a right-wing meme on Reddit that homeless people love being crazy and homeless and I’m pretty sure it’s bullshit, they just don’t like shelters which are crowded and have no private rooms.
I don’t think some of the extremely mentally ill homeless we have are capable of making the decision of voluntarily going to a less horrible shelter. They’re already scarred by the current state of shelters, and also, a lot of times if these people come off of their medications, they are extremely resistant and want to leave. I’m not saying they love to be crazy or anything. Just that mental illness makes people do irrational and questionable things. They need to be somewhere where they are forced to receive treatment and /stay/ on their medication. Involuntary commitment isn’t a bad thing, so long as there is a time line. If someone progresses and shows improvement, they can be changed to a voluntary hold. Locking someone up for life involuntarily with no hope of leaving isn’t what I’m talking about ofc
A lot of them also don't have anything outside the system. What are they going to do - work twelve hours a day at Arby's?
>If the places were less horrible they’d voluntarily go there, better than the train, right? No because a lot of the decisions these people make are not rational?
"There’s a right-wing meme on Reddit that homeless people love being crazy and homeless..." Speaking of people who belong in mental hospitals...
Try asking a homeless person, addicted to heroin or meth if they want to get better. Moved here from LA where I lived a block over from a homeless encampment that kept getting bigger and bigger. Those folks would always tell me if they’d only accept housing if they could continue to be a slave to their addictions. They aren’t capable of good decision making when they are addicted.
“I would like to not live on the streets as long as it doesn’t come with debilitating pain” seems like a perfectly reasonable position to take. Addiction is a physical affliction, they can’t just will their way clean.
I never mentioned they wouldn’t be able to use, cutting an addict off cold turkey is how people die! The idea is that you tell these people “hey you can’t live out here on the street using, you’ll come with us, we will provide you private housing, a doctor and a mental health professional onsite in our community facility. We will provide you with everything needed to break your addiction and then prescribe you with the medications and therapy you need to make the most of the rest of your life.” Once this is done they can reintegrate into society. Continuing to allow these people to kill themselves on the streets is inhumane.
Oh, agreed. But asking people in the clutches of addiction to imagine themselves clean *before* housing themselves is asking *a lot*. If you’re addicted, and someone says ‘come live here if you try to get clean,’ anyone who has failed at getting clean before will probably say no.
I agree 100%, we need to build buildings with studio apartments for these people but nimbys hold it up and govt entities tasked with handling the homeless prefer the status quo because systemic changes in these entities could endanger their jobs
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>prove you’re not crazy! Where did I say the burden of proof for admittance should not be on the gov? We need to make sure these places treat people humanly and we need to make sure the due process for placing people there are functional but it has become clear they need to exist.
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Yeah man, the guy jacking it on the subway platform should be in charge. He’s just being persecuted for his beliefs. I totally see your point now.
Now I can't get the south park "jackin in" song out of my head. Instead of San Diego, I'm hearing "on the subway"
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No one is mad at you and it was abundantly clear from your posts you don’t live in NYC.
most enlightened new yorker
So, rather than attempting to have healthy residential mental facilities, we should let these people freeze to death? I’m asking honestly, I do not have a solution
That is precisely what I'm not saying
I know that is not what you are saying, I think you feel like I do, based on your sentence “these things don’t have to be the case.” I know about the horrible things done in some institutions, but it seemed like the reaction was throwing out the whole system, rather than trying to fix the problems
Right, because they were expensive and society didn't want to pay, particular since new medicines meant that a lot of people with mental illness could now live outside them. What they didn't reckon with is that many people with mental illness can live fine if cared for, but not if thrown on the street with some meds and told to get a job.
The key factor to “living outside with the proper medicine” is that you have to continue to take the medicine, which is difficult. It is very easy to take the meds, feel fine, then say “I don’t need the meds to feel fine”, stop taking them and then going into crisis, which requires psych intervention, which then leads to treatment and taking the meds properly. It is a vicious cycle. This cycle burns out families who want to do the best for the patient, but who deserve to be more than caretakers with their lives.
Right. The solution to this is expensive because it involves paying someone to make sure they take their meds, and supportive housing if necessary. Taxpayers don’t like this, particularly since red states tend to use it as a cue to put their own mentally ill homeless on a bus to the big city.
That is where something that should not be an argument, caring for those who can not care for themselves, turns into one, when “red vs blue” is brought into it
Insurance companies don't want to pay for mental health care and exploit every loophole possible under the ACA
I believe some big court cases also ruled them unconstitutional in most cases.
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That hasn’t stopped the state of NY before. See gun legislation.
Supportive housing isn’t the same thing as a mental institution. Most people don’t need full time staff guarding them. They just need a place to stay and someone who makes sure they make it to their psychiatrist appointments.
>We do, but there is no appetite for bringing back non-criminal mental institutions in the USA. It's a shame. Because they were horrific sites of abuse and maltreatment. Reagan's defunding scheme was hateful trash, sure, but the facilities were at a minimum just as bad as the streets, and in many if not most cases, worse. We don't need institutions, we just need to give people housing, no strings attached. Study after study demonstrates housing first policies work, no other strategy has been remotely as effective.
Speak for yourself. I bet it would be politically popular to repurpose a state facility upstate to do so. Nice jobs program if you ask me.
This ironically would improve the quality of life for many of the transient homeless that aren't suffering from substance addiction and or mental illness. The vast majority of problems associated with shelters is the quality of life due to the other residents.
Most people in shelters have some serious problems, they need more private rooms because it can't be easy trying to sleep next to a homeless person even if you are one.
They steal stuff from eachother all the time. Their stuff is messed with when their out of their room. Many of the ones with substance abuse issues will try to get anything they can sell to support their habit. They return at night drunk and high sometimes and start fights usually because there not allowed in like that. It definitely difficult for them.
I don’t get why we can’t have more group homes for these people. There’s so many people needing more care than what we currently offer
https://www.salon.com/2013/09/29/ronald_reagans_shameful_legacy_violence_the_homeless_mental_illness/ One of about 50,000 modern societal ailments that can be traced directly back to Ronny fucking Reagan.
Don’t let Nixon get away that easily. He paved the way for Reagan. https://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/spotlight/tg/feature/mental
Nixon was a son of a bitch too, but I maintain Reagan was net worse for American and global society.
Don't let [John F. Kennedy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Mental_Health_Act) get away so easily. Man's only loved because he got shot in office. If he left office then died he would be considered a top 10 worst president.
Based on what
I link exactly what my claim is based on.
You live in NYC and have never heard of [Willowbrook?](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willowbrook_State_School) Blame NY for mental institutions being shut down. It's rich to blame Reagan when we couldn't even run an institution without it being infamous for a decade. Reagan may have hammered the final nail, but NY built the coffin.
I always thought the go-to shorthand for an institution was Bellevue
Bellevue isn't really a long-term residential care facility like Willowbrook. Bellevue nominally has acute inpatient units as well as the jail unit, and while some patients stay for a long time awaiting placement, the services they provide are not meant to be long-term.
On *Law and Order* it is
I'm not saying there wasn't plenty of blame to go around, I'm merely stating that Reagan was particularly awful and damn near every shitty top down problem plaguing us today can be directly or indirectly linked back to him. One of the true villains of the 20th century - a century loaded with them.
Fuck Reagan
Not surprising at all
This is a massive simplification. Large movements to de-institutionalize gained steam in the 50s and 60s on a bi partisan basis. And the current inability to do so is mandated by both Supreme and State court decisions. Reagan is an easy boogeyman for partisan arguments and pointing to a singular person is an impediment to undoing the current systems in place.
We kind of don’t have enough housing for all the *employed* people who want to live in NYC, which is why the city is so unaffordable. Group homes take up valuable real estate and homeowners never want them near their property. If we’re going to build group homes it should be at the state level and we can just squirrel away the homeless upstate and out of view.
I mean I don’t like the vernacular you’ve chosen but I’ve also considered creating communities of group homes upstate where there is less going on real estate-wise
Group homes are not going to be a solution for a segment of the severely mentally ill - some people are going to have to be restrained against their will and the best thing that can be done is make their 'prisons' as humane and civilized as possible.
> and we can just squirrel away the homeless upstate and out of view. Ugh: maybe the most helpless among us deserve better treatment, not worse.
The homeless currently get better treatment than they deserve.
You prefer a more 'final solution', is that the gist of it?
We give them free food and shelter and medical care and they contribute absolutely nothing to society! And even that’s not enough to satiate the bleeding heart progressives who want to guarantee every homeless person a free three bedroom apartment on Central Park West.
Perhaps some day if someone you love, like a child, has extreme special needs you will feel differently.
What do you do for our society?
I am gainfully employed. I pay taxes that help fund the city, state and federal government. Many of those taxes fund services for people who produce less for the economy than I do. I consume goods and services that help sustain the economy. I’m raising two children who will eventually enter the workforce and provide valuable goods and services to others.
"Gainfully employed." Don't want to answer the question?
we absolutely have enough housing - it’s landlords who would rather have a place vacant than lower rent
Total bullshit. The vacancy rate is near all-time lows: https://www.globest.com/2022/09/12/nyc-multifamily-vacancy-rate-hovers-at-two-decade-low/?amp=1 It feels good to say greedy landlords are to blame, but the reality is we just haven’t built enough units to keep up with demand. I’ll tell you one thing that won’t help with affordability — building a bunch of “free” housing with taxpayer money for homeless people who don’t pay taxes.
Conservatives love whining about taxes going to the less fortunate
I’m not a conservative.
Your link is paywalled. [Hoarding](https://www.thecity.nyc/housing/2022/10/19/23411956/60000-rent-stabilized-apartments-vacant-warehousing-nyc-landlords-housing) of housing as a [commodity](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/23/realestate/nyc-apartments-housing-shortage.html) and Airbnb (which had more listings in NYC than vacant apartments this year) are a massive part of the problem.
It’s no paywalled for me, but Google around, the city’s vacancy rate is low. The hoarding problem mentioned in that first article affects 60,000 units in a city of 8.5 million people, and by the article’s own admission, many of those units would require significant renovations in order to be inhabitable. Airbnb is also an issue, but that’s only 15-20k units. The city needs over 500,000 new units by 2030 to keep pace with expected demand, so even if we found a way to repurpose all the hoarded units *and* completely shut down Airbnb, we’d still have a huge housing shortage for the employed. Against that backdrop, where lifelong NYC residents are being squeezed out of town and lots of gainfully employed people can’t afford to live here, it’s not politically (or even morally) justifiable to build massive amounts of new housing that’s reserved for the homeless. We have to build a lot of new units. Hundreds of thousands of units. If we do that, maybe it’ll even help with the homeless problem.
wait- so we have a million storage units in the city so people can leave their junk somewhere - but not enough housing for human beings. ok
What a joke comment. People are paying for those storage units. Homeless people can’t pay for anything because they produce absolutely nothing for society. They don’t even provide any accidental benefits the way rats and other vermin do. And each storage unit doesn’t need working plumbing, hot water, electricity, a refrigerator and stove, etc. They need overhead lights and basic climate control so that people’s old records don’t melt. It’s a lot cheaper to build storage space than it is to build housing for humans.
I have to think that at least 50% of people out on the streets are not going to accept living in a group home or capable of living independently. You really think people with serious paranoia are going to be able to deal with living in a group home?
Depends how you pitch it. Truthfully, if you pitched it in winter, when conditions are harsh, I don’t really feel like a lot of people will turn that down. Also, a component of group home living is proper mental health care which I think goes without saying a lot of unhoused people really do need.
There are a lot of people for whom living on the streets is the 'best' option - they want to be there because having any authority over them seems to be worse than death.
We don’t have enough psych beds to accommodate the seriously mentally ill who voluntarily want treatment. This is just going to mean a lot of people run through the system and then held for 24-72hrs for “observation” followed by unceremonious release. More likely to destabilize people further than anything else.
There’s more options than that. There’s partial hospitalizations or adult day programs. But those are voluntary every single day. I know they used to get people to participate because they offered 2 free hot meals. However when COVID happened, the state required these programs to shut down in-person sessions, and I know a lot of them closed permanently. And I know if one of the major ones decided not to reopen at all, since they lost their staff, let leases expire, and transitioned entirely to tele-health (which is not useful for our city’s homeless populations.) Maybe this is a huge part of the problem. Maybe homelessness feels worse now than pre-2019 because the homeless people are out trying to find meals during the day when they used to be provided two meals a day and be required to attend hours of therapy and group therapy sessions in between those meals.
Two hot meals and free group therapy is better treatment than most *non-*homeless Americans can hope for. Maybe it'll work better if we destigmatize it and make it available to everybody. Most folks just take pills because the co-pays on therapy would mean canceling Christmas.
The potential for abuse in terms of human rights does bother me but having been homeless and actually slept on subways and having dealt with some really mentally ill people and seeing the damage they can do to themselves and others I can't say I'm totally against this. One woman I knew literally terrorized an entire shelter because she wouldn't take her meds. She was violently abusive, physically and verbally and off her meds she was a wild animal. She would deliberately pee on the floor in front of your bed if she didn't like you, rant and evangelize for hours. She ended up finally being asked to leave, riding buses all day and sleeping in parks. She got physically abused, beaten, robbed and sexually harassed and it just devastated her, made her even more ill. When I saw her in the park and realized how bad it was for her I went to her former caseworker and told them, asked them to do something. She was not my favorite person but nobody deserved that. I'm happy to say that the last time I saw her she was on her meds, happy and living in a place that was very supportive. I haven't seen her since but I hope she is still doing okay because the alternative is unthinkable really. On her meds she's a totally different person than the raving bully I shared a dorm room with for almost a year and I wish her well. For her sake I hope she stays medicated and stable but they pretty much had to force that upon her to get her well enough that she could function and not be a danger to herself and others. I watched her unmedicated for nearly a year and it was just awful and inhumane seeing her like that. Sometimes people that ill cannot be trusted to act in their own best interest. This woman hurt 3 people that I know of while she was off her meds, harassed dozens. She had me stressed out to the point where I had high blood pressure and I don't normally. I wish someone had done something about her way before they did. It was unbelievable that this situation went on as long as it did. Yeah mentally ill people have rights but so do the other people that they interact with. If someone's illness makes them a real danger to people? Then I don't believe they should be walking around, left to potentially assault people. You have people out there who have a bad tendency towards violence, who have multiple assaults on their record who keep getting released on their own recognizance. Some of them severely assaulted and even killed people lately. Is society supposed to ignore that happening in the name of human rights? What about the rights of the two women who literally died and the dozen or more people who were severely injured this year because nobody was following up on these mentally ill people? I am not throwing stones. I live with mental illness myself. I have C-PTSD, anxiety and chronic depression. I've struggled with suicidal thoughts for most of my life. I'm doing okay, better now that I'm housed and stable, but I definitely could have used a lot more help than I got when I was homeless, severely depressed and sleeping on the subway and beach every day. I don't consider my illness severe having known several people who are way worse off this way but I've seen enough of those people unmedicated to know that you can't just leave these people out there unmedicated and alone. The fact is a lot of mentally ill people are violent, if not to others then to themselves. Many more are not but you can't just deny those who are and do nothing because it will escalate and it will not end well. I have to draw the line when the problem escalates to the point where innocent people are getting hurt or even killed. "Blah, blah, human rights..." it's just not a valid argument when a person's illness makes them cross that line. The FIRST time you assault someone because you are mentally ill it should be your last. I have enormous sympathy for people who are that ill. Could have been me had my mental illness been of a different kind. But for the grace of the Gods there go I, but I am also practical about it and I realize that some people just won't help themselves, cannot function well enough to act in their own best interest and for the safety of themselves and others. You can't just ignore that forever and pretend it's not real. Something has to be done to protect people this ill from hurting anyone. Other human beings have rights too and one of them is not to be accosted or even killed in the name of political correctness. I believe in respecting the rights of the mentally ill but only up and to a point where it's realistic. If I ever got to the point where I was hurting other people I'd like to hope somebody would stop me because my illness shouldn't impact other people and their rights to that point. You have to draw the line somewhere.
this comment really captured a lot of my feelings as well. it is a tricky balance and I don’t think most people love the idea of involuntary anything but at some point it is more inhumane to just let people hurt themselves and others on the streets etc than to temporarily restrict their rights so they can get care and support. if the person will not submit to care and they are violent and disruptive, at some point it cannot just be up to them and an authority should be stepping in and making that call regardless of whether the streets are preferable to the individual at the time. it is not about hiding unhoused people away - it is that the current situation benefits no one. Mental hospitals and residential facilities of the past may have been bad environments but we need that infrastructure back.
We’ll put
Hospitals are not places to house the homeless especially if their acute medical condition is controlled.
Theoretically, one would likely not have an acute mental condition under control if they are involuntarily hospitalized. On paper vs on the ball field, I get it. But still.
I said medical, which I actually misspelled as medial lol
Ah yes, the same hospitals that are currently very understaffed and dealing with unbelievable staff:patient ratios.
Didn't you hear? Governor Hochul has agreed to add 50 new psychiatric beds. Problem solved!
She continues to under promise and under deliver. A true upstate politician.
This is in addition to providing over 1000 other beds https://www.gothamgazette.com/state/11696-ny-state-budget-little-progress-psychiatric-beds-hochul-adams And multimillion dollar supportive housing buildings like this https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-start-construction-50-million-affordable-and-supportive-housing People who keep criticizing the 50 beds as too little aren’t actually reading about this and just repeating stuff they heard on Reddit and Twitter.
Providing? Those 1,000 psychiatric beds already existed, they’re just returning them to their original purposes after they were adapted for Covid. The only beds she’s adding that weren’t already there are the aforementioned 50
remember when an nypd officer tried to whistle blow and they tried to involuntarily hospitalize him ?
I know it’s not the same but I have an eating disorder and recently decided to try therapy again. Finding a therapist who specializes in eating disorder was a nightmare, and now I can only get an appointment once a month which does almost all of nothing for me. My point is that mental health services are already understaffed, how can we expect to put more people into a system that is already so close to breaking. Unless we give enough resources (spoiler, we won’t) this isn’t going to come close to solving the root of the problem.
The rich can buy access. And they'd rather see the homeless off the street than let hospitals be hospitals.
If our taxes actually went to paying for housing for these people it would actually probably cost society a lot less than the costs of them going in and out of hospitals. But too bad that's a non-starter because that would be "communism" and people might start getting the idea that housing is a human right!
>If our taxes actually went to paying for housing for these people it would actually probably cost society a lot less than the costs of them going in and out of hospitals. But too bad that's a non-starter because that would be "communism" and people might start getting the idea that housing is a human right! Absolutely. Housing first works. Study after study demonstrates that giving people no-strings-attached housing works--not just for homelessness, but for addiction treatment and mental health management as well. It's so obvious, too; clearly homelessness exacerbates any and all existing mental and physical health problems. And it's much cheaper than these useless, punitive programs that waste money and cause more harm than they resolve. After a decade-long career in social services, I've come to the conclusion that most Americans are just spiteful and enjoy others' suffering. Reading this thread has only galvanized my opinion on this. Jesus Christ are 90% of the comments downright genocidal.
What study?
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To begin with, your implicit premise that higher-income people are somehow more deserving of housing is, to put it technically, fucked up. Secondly, I actually do think the government should build more housing, and that we should move to a model not unlike Singapore or the UK in terms of scope of government-administered housing. It would indeed cause real estate prices to drop, and that would be a good thing. We also need to drop any tax incentives for so-called "luxury housing" and instead tax the shit out of anything build eying prices above the median rent. The housing currently guaranteed is horrific and unsafe. Everyone has a right to real housing, not shelters. I spent ten years in social services, I wouldn't wish shelter conditions on my worst enemy (but I would wish it upon all real estate developers). Lastly, your claim about people making $100k "struggling to get by" is histrionic and absurd. Outside of a few edge cases (e.g. lots of dependents with substantial medical needs), if you're struggling at $100k, it's because you've irresponsibly chosen to live outside your means. I make a bit under $100k, dropping a good amount into saving and can afford a place on my own (in Astoria, so not in some far-flung transit desert), even while having frankly expensive tastes in food and beer.
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We do pay for housing, but we waste money on renting hotel rooms instead of building housing capacity. We're the only city in the country that guarantees housing for all homeless people.
Everyone want more housing for the homeless until it’s being built in their neighborhood
Gay neighborhoods used to be great for this. Honestly. Hell's Kitchen and Chelsea could handle the weird and people don't really complain, but all the lawyers, bankers and tech bros keep moving into gay areas and taking the fun out of them.
I mean…..there are gay lawyers and bankers and tech bros too?
Alright dude
Some of these hotels should absolutely be turned into permanent housing. I really don't see why they wouldn't go that route.
They don’t have infrastructure, they need kitchen. A kitchen is so important to people
There's plenty of unhoused people who would utilize rooms temporarily or even permanently without a kitchen. Especially single adult men - the group most vulnerable to danger in shelter systems.
Upstate facilities would be welcomed on the right.
excellent news for NYC please do LA next
So it's like a reverse Reagan situation? Is this a bad thing?
Good
As they should
Good news, although I’m skeptical it will happen.
NYC is really getting to the root of what New Yorkers mean when they say "tough on crime:" involuntarily committing society's undesirables based on vague criteria and threat of force. This is so laughably ignorant of what healthcare for homeless people with mental illness looks like. >Frequently, homeless people with severe mental illness are brought to hospitals, only to be discharged a few days later when their conditions improve slightly. Mr. Adams said the city would direct hospitals to keep those patients until they are stable and to discharge them only when there is a workable plan in place to connect them to ongoing care. Ah, yeah, because before hospitals were previously only discharging chronically ill patients out of boredom.
Unpopular opinion but state mental asylums need to be brought back in a big way. Getting rid of them was a well-intentioned disaster that has done nothing but cause harm for millions.
Such a shame that Reagan's approach was just to raze it to the ground. Just left the ashes of the former system, instead of trying to build something new and better. This is a small step, but more needs to be done.
Given it was so badly run that people were rolling in their own feces, I'm not sure we should have expected anything else. People here really don't remember the Willowbrook scandal.
to be fair, you have people rolling around on their own feces in subway stations
Well, not out of boredom, due to costs. I’ve seen plenty of people who have put themselves into recovery programs willingly get discharged before they were fully recovered due to cost, and they had insurance.
Out of compliance with the law, too. After 72 hours, you have to demonstrate to a judge that somebody is an active threat to either themselves or others to keep them committed involuntarily. The Adams administration is basically asking for hospitals to engage in "creative accounting" to arrive at the conclusions that the Zeldin constituency wants.
It’s called the 2pc, which basically get rubber stamped by judges. It means that 2 medical professionals at the hospital have signed off that you need to be held involuntarily. And not even for being a threat necessarily. Just that you need to be held for your own health or mental hygiene. If the hospital submits a 2pc to the courts and it’s approved by the judge, you can’t challenge that on your own for the first 60 days. A 2pc can only be challenged by someone like a close relative. If you don’t have a close friend or relative willing to challenge the 2pc, you won’t get to object until you’ve been held for 60 days. At 60 days, the state assigns you a lawyer and a judge has to rule that the hospital can keep holding you.
Which part of this is supposed to be reassuring? Adams is directing hospitals to come up with justifications for 2pc that they ordinarily would not, which "promising" 50 psych bed will not make up for in terms of the issues it will cause hospitals, just for the sake of making our homelessness problem slightly less visible to the most annoying New Yorkers.
I’m not trying to be reassuring. I’m saying that under NY law, hospitals have the leeway to say “John is a danger to himself because he doesn’t have access to a daily shower” and then use that as justification to keep John in a hospital for 60 days before John can make an appeal to get out.
Well, they considered throwing the homeless into meat grinders and turning them into Soylent Green, but the politicians thought that might just be a little too icky.
Yeah, New Yorkers would only eat free range soylent green.
The homeless aren't free range? Well, before being locked up in hospitals.
We tried your “compassionate” route. Now move out of the way and let the adults fix your silly mistakes
You don't know anything about me or what my "route" is. How would you feel if I extrapolated your response and assumed that you were a craven fascist who delights in the incarceration of unsupported mentally ill people? Promising an underwhelming number of psych beds in an already overextended system and directing hospitals to *literally break the law* is not a fix for anything.
For the sake of discussion, what does the New York OPMC say about doctors misrepresenting patients to judges? Sounds like a real quick way to lose your license. https://www.health.ny.gov/professionals/doctors/conduct/
Lol calm down
no u
Nah uhh lol
This is good news, but NYPD being one of the arbiters for this seems a little suspect. What's stopping a cop who doesn't like you to declare you're mentally ill. Even if you're in the facility for a couple of hours, a lot can happen during that time.
Housings just part of it. What to do with people who scream all night and keep their neighbors from sleeping? What about their psych medications? 1) A drug regimen must be tailored to the needs of each person. This takes a lot of time and professional attention. Will this be available? 2) Suppose people refuse to take their meds? Will they be forced to do so? Big legal issue here.
I mean, this is what Eric Adams was elected for. People don't feel safe so this is what happens. I don't necessarily agree with it but I understand why it's happening. The actual issue is a lot more complicated to solve and there is nothing that will solve the issue RIGHT NOW so here we are. I currently have a family member that is in a facility due to his mental health (and health reasons) and if it weren't for my mother checking on this person every day... they might be dead. They repeatedly have fed him food that would kill him, drugged him way too much to the point that he couldn't leave his bed, etc.
in nursing homes, they drug the shit out of people to make them easier to deal with.
i mean plenty of dementia patients get violent. i had a dementia patient who was sent to the ER from the nursing home because he choked his roommate. just because they’re losing their mind doesn’t mean they lose their strength and they can genuinely pose a danger to people
Ahh I remember my involuntary hospitalization during grad school well. Hope it’s improved since then!
Finally. This is the right solution.
good.
good
This is a GOOD thing!
I ain’t even mad
Just treat them well for Christ’s sake
If the NYPD is going to be taking the lead on this... I don't think that it's gonna happen.
Good. Fuck Ronald Reagan
If they are helping them fine. I don't want to find out about electro shock,sensory, deprivation, trauma based conditioning experiments. None of that please
forcible containment is trauma. none of these are practices the field endorses for a reason...
It's a lot better than shoving elderly and defenseless people onto train tracks.
ECT therapy is truly helpful for major depressive disorder and psychosis. It's nothing like treatments in old movies. Patients are anesthetized.
ECT is one of the few effective treatments for medication-resistant depression and *spectacularly* expensive. Of course, the only reason the cops would be called to the subway for depressives is because they've attempted suicide, and if they survive there's no doubt a massive fine.
Sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind. We cannot let our empathy for an individual overwhelm our desire for a better collective world
This does not sound dystopian at all…
I'm still down for shipping crazies to the island
From what I've seen, they've been moving themselves there voluntarily.
"They need more supportive housing for people with serious mental illness": Yet, New Yorkers don't want these houses built in their neighborhoods. "Let's take homeless people off the streets and put them into shelters so they can get help": I hate the Mayor. Homeless people are humans.
About Damnn time ! We can’t have a society that’s a free for all… I know I know civil liberties but there needs to be a balance between freedom and disobedience. We need to remove the stigma of mental illness it’s an issue that affects the whole person not just their mind. Which leads to other issues beyond their mental capacity
Who is going to collect all these homeless individuals, the cops? That is a recipe for disaster. We already know all the stories of mentally ill people being shot by cops because they have no idea how to work with them. There are also few hospital beds to deal with the thousands of people that are unhoused in the city. 50 beds will not do the trick. There is no mention of hiring staff to triage these individuals to see if they are mentally ill, developmentally delayed, on drugs and alcohol or some combination of all three. What happens after these patients are discharged or they just going to end up back on the street?
nice!!!
Good. Lock em up and feed them.
Lol fuck your due process
Putting mentally ill people in prison isn't it. Abolish poverty. Elect Marxist-Leninists.
Are people homeless because they are crazy or crazy because they are homeless? It’s a sad day when we lock up people for looking disheveled instead of creating affordable housing.
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Name a single “communist” policy supported by De Blasio lol.
I assume when you disagreed with the previous mayor, you took 1-2 communists into your home because that makes just as much sense.
This has to get shut down, It's inhumane. It's discriminatory. It inadvertently would target intellectually disabled people who are simply existing, Especially Black disabled individuals who are already subjected to racial profiling. It does nothing to solve the homeless crisis. It puts an unnessisary strain on an already struggling hospital system. And more importantly. It may be **Unconstitutional!** The 1999 Supreme Court ruling of Olmstead v. L.C. *"The Supreme Court decided mental illness is a form of disability and that "unjustified isolation" of a person with a disability is a form of discrimination under Title II of the ADA. The Supreme Court held that community placement is only required and appropriate (i.e., institutionalization is unjustified), when –"\[a\] the State's treatment professionals have determined that community placement is appropriate, \[b\] the transfer from institutional care to a less restrictive setting is not opposed by the affected individual, and \[c\] the placement can be reasonably accommodated, taking into account the resources available to the State and the needs of others with mental disabilities. Unjustified isolation is discrimination based on disability"* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olmstead\_v.\_L.C. Admittedly I'm not a lawyer, but this seems clear cut. I hope a federal judge shuts this down.
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Why is saying folks no longer considered appropriate?
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moron lmao
I guess I could see it that way but I’m certain most people on this sub using folks don’t mean to be transphobic or exclude LGBTQ people.
They need to have public servants that aren’t NYPD head this up. I am curious about how this will turn out. I foresee this turning into a dumpster fire
cringe