By Robert Hornak
It’s been just over 30-years since Rudy Giuliani won a historic election for mayor of New York City and ushering in a renaissance that proved Ed Koch was wrong about the city being unmanageable and started an urban reform movement that swept American cities throughout the 1990’s.
Giuliani demonstrated what policies worked to make American cities better, namely active policing and what was called broken windows enforcement. That meant dealing with all the little quality of life problems, like the notorious squeegee men harassing drivers stuck in traffic and aggressive homeless panhandlers harassing people walking down the street or in the subway.
But most important, Rudy showed New Yorkers that they don’t need to settle for weak, ineffective, or misguided leadership from our officeholders.
And if there was one issue that Giuliani surely would have liked to have done better on, and likely every mayor since, is in dealing with our homeless and emotionally disturbed people living on the streets. Things had gotten better for a while, at least for the general public, but the homeless crises never went away and is now worse than ever with more violent incidents than ever.
The excuse given is the 1975 Supreme Court decision O’Connor v. Donaldson, where, according to the AMA, the “U.S. Supreme Court declared that a person had to be a danger to him or herself or to others for confinement to be constitutional.” This was a seminal decision that, as the NY Times reported then, forced the release of “thousands of the estimated total of 250,000 patients regarded as untreated, harmless and not likely to become community charges.”
But today, we are not dealing with people who are harmless, able to care for themselves, and most important not in need of treatment. Just the opposite, these are mostly people who are in desperate need of mental health treatment and medication, treatment that they are unable to seek and maintain on their own.
And this is not a controversial position. The public overwhelmingly agrees. A poll just released by the Association for a Better New York showed that 91% of voters agree that “people struggling with severe mental illness should not be denied life-saving psychiatric care because their illness prevents them from recognizing that they need help.”
With 91% agreeing on an issue as critical as the homeless crisis you’d think that the mayor and the governor would act with the strongest sense of urgency to start moving our chronically homeless into treatment facilities. And if you think that, you’d be wrong.
In January, Hochul announced that she would introduce legislation in the budget to “finally change New York’s involuntary commitment standards.” That was the extent of her statement then on this critical issue.
In response to the new poll, her spokesman said, “Providing care to people facing significant health risks due to mental illness is a compassionate and humane approach that all New Yorkers can recognize.” In an effort to pass the buck he further stated, “We look forward to working with the Legislature to enact these statutory changes and align New York with 43 other states that already have this in their laws.”
But it’s not clear that new laws are required. Remember this was the same claim about securing the southern border, which President Trump showed just required the willpower and leadership to solve. The same appears to be true here, and has been for years.
There is plenty of available bed space in underutilized hospitals, like Creedmoor in eastern Queens. 20,000 beds there are mostly unused that could be converted back to an inpatient facility to provide the long-term treatment that is required to hopefully return these people to normalcy.
But without a mayor, with the help of a governor, willing to make this happen and then fight to defend it in court, no progress is likely to be made on this issue. And no progress, no leadership, and no will, is what New Yorkers learned once before they do not need to tolerate.
Robert Hornak is a professional political consultant who has previously served as the Deputy Director of the Republican Assembly Leader’s NYC office and as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @RobertHornak on X.
