5 hours Ago By Hannah E. Meyers
David Stern has had it. The Morningside Heights resident has been barraging 911 recently to dislodge a man who’s set up camp under the scaffolding outside Stern’s apartment building, frequently exposing himself in front of Stern’s young sons. When cops show up, they can ask the man if he needs assistance — but can’t remove him .
“I’m the taxpayer but you’re here to check on that guy,” Stern fumed to me. The man has become a neighborhood fixture, other locals told me — often seen shirtless, enjoying a blunt in the sun, sipping a beer or crab-walking his wheelchair backward and diagonally across busy intersections. Stern once filmed the guy whizzing on his building and showed it to police — “on my phone, the stream coming out of him.
” No matter: Officers must witness public urination themselves just to issue a violation. “That was the moment that flipped the switch for me,” David recalled. “Yeah, you guys are useless.
” But the inertia may finally be changing. Last week, public frustration with the city’s laissez-faire attitude pushed Gov. Kathy Hochul into using the state budget to declare that an inability to meet basic living needs justifies involuntary hospitalization.
And NYPD Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch’s new Quality of Life Initiative, rolled out in some city neighborhoods last month (although not yet in Morningside Heights), is creating a comprehensive one-response system for New Yorkers like Stern. Earlier efforts at sweeps to clear homeless encampments have faced loud backlash from NYC’s progressive squawkers. When Mayor Eric Adams tried it in 2022, city Comptroller (and current mayoral hopeful) Brad Lander criticized the initiative as “failed” when he found that only 5% of the thousands “swept” would even accept temporary shelter.
How many of those rousted individuals entered permanent housing? Just three . Another series of police-led sweeps in 2024 reportedly removed over 27,000 individuals from city streets over nine months — yet didn’t solve the problems Stern and other city residents see daily. But Tisch’s new Q-Teams, set to expand this summer, are meant to force a more bluntly realistic approach.
“I don’t think it’s the lack of housing,” said a Manhattan police executive I’ll call “Javier.” “They’re homeless because something inside of them clicks that wants to be homeless,” he said. “You could put them up in a palace and I think they’d still walk out and do what they do.
” A big part of the dysfunction equation is substance abuse, which the pilot Q-Teams are encountering “every time,” Javier explained. “Some just want an addiction hit — others are just crazy and [use drugs and alcohol] as a way to cope,” he observed. Another factor keeping homeless on the streets: A beggar on a busy Manhattan sidewalk can rake in a couple of thousand dollars a day.
“It’s crazy the amount of money they make on street corners,” Javier told me. No wonder they don’t want to budge. It stands to reason Adams’ earlier sweeps had no real effect: Their stated goal was coaxing the city’s homeless into long-term thriving.
The “Housing First” model championed by homeless advocates, including Lander, offers free permanent residences with no obligation to receive mental-health treatment or desist from substance abuse and its related criminality. It futilely appeals to a population that prefers to stay put on city pavements. Indeed, Lander’s 2023 report found that 31% of swept encampments had been rebuilt within one year.
But “Nick,” a senior police officer in one of the five Manhattan precincts where Tisch’s Q-Teams are operating, says this time it’s different. “We’re about two weeks into it and, so far, we’re seeing results,” Nick enthused. When a citizen complains about an encampment, NYPD officers photograph the scene — “anything with a homeless person with all of his belongings taking up space qualifies” — and a Q-Team rapidly follows up.
The vagabonds are permitted to cart off as much as they can carry; everything else gets tossed into a sanitation truck. The “revolving door” remains, Nick admitted. “You are moving them around,” Nick told me.
“You’ll clean it up and it looks great for a week, and then they come back and do it all over again.” But he’s convinced that with consistent enforcement, the city will “show them they’re not going to live on the street with boxes of stuff” — and that homeless individuals will “eventually get tired of being harassed and say: ‘I’ll go to a program now.’” In the short term, streets are cleaner, and vulnerable New Yorkers who accept help are getting it.
The teams are also improving public safety: They’ve already turned up homeless individuals with open warrants — even for crimes as serious as murder, Nick told me. And the voices of engaged citizens like David Stern are finally being heard. Hannah E.
Meyers is a fellow and the director of policing and public safety at the Manhattan Institute..
