Thousands of homeless New Yorkers have continued to seek shelter in the city’s subways, avoiding an overwhelmed and crowded shelter system that poses its own dangers during the COVID-19 pandemic. On Tuesday, both Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio condemned the presence of the homeless in the subways, but they offered little in the way of solutions to the problem.
Mayor Bill de Blasio is calling for the MTA to close ten subway stations so NYPD and homeless outreach workers can help get the homeless into shelters, and so the MTA can clean the stations thoroughly.
“We'll devote the police resources, we'll devote the outreach workers, we'll do whatever it takes, but we need the MTA to agree to this plan,” de Blasio said Tuesday.
The MTA has vaguely said it agrees with the mayor’s goals, but won’t commit to closing terminals between 12 a.m. and 5 a.m. as de Blasio suggested. The agency has said it already cleans stations everyday, and all trains every 72 hours.
“We're relieved on behalf of our customers and employees that the City has agreed to do more to provide safe shelter for homeless New Yorkers but it should not have taken a global pandemic for the City to do a job the MTA has called on it to do for years.
“Happy the city has agreed to do more to provide safe shelter for homeless NYers as we have been asking for months. We thank NYPD for their partnership, and urge City Hall to take additional aggressive actions so we can focus on safely running transit service and not providing social services,” MTA spokesperson Abbey Collins wrote in a statement.
Collins said that the MTA is “taking trains out of service at end-of-line and other stations for a short period of time to improve safety and cleanliness while mitigating any impact on essential workers,” but said that the agency has had to hire 150 private security guards to “serve as the eyes and ears of our system” in the absence of the NYPD and city social workers.
“The Mayor should get out of his car and into the subways so he can see what is really going on and solve the problem of his own making,” Collins said.
At his daily coronavirus briefing, Governor Cuomo, who controls the MTA, held up a copy of the Daily News, which ran pictures of homeless people on the subway.
“That is disgusting, what is happening on those subway cars,” Cuomo said. “It’s disrespectful to the essential workers who need to ride the subway system.”
Cuomo offered no ideas or solutions. “We have to do better than that, and we will,” he said.
The interim head of New York City Transit Sarah Feinberg penned a 641 word Op-Ed in the New York Post, stating the agency will change its “code of conduct” to further criminalize the homeless for staying in the subway system.
“We are changing our Code of Conduct to make it abundantly clear that the transit system must be used by people for transport only — not for sheltering, sleeping, storing belongings or panhandling. We will enforce these new regulations in close coordination with our NYPD partners and the MTAPD,” Feinberg wrote.
Other changes: The MTA will not allow shopping carts in stations, and no one will be allowed to spend more than an hour on the platform or they’ll be asked to leave.
The agency is also continuing to hire new MTA police officers, an expenditure that won’t be cut amid its ongoing budget crisis.
“Mayor de Blasio has to direct the police to escort the mentally ill and the homeless out of the system,” Transport Workers Union Local 100 President Tony Utano wrote in a statement. “This is a life-and-death situation, not a quality of life issue.”
MTA board member Andrew Albert, and NYC Transit Riders Council Chair Lisa Daglian, Executive Director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, said in a joint statement that closing stations in combat homelessness is a “terrible idea.”
“Riders need to use those stations and lines to get to early shifts and home from overnight shifts. Cleaning equipment and crew quarters are often at the ends of lines. Not to mention, the problem would just move to the ‘new’ end of the line,” the statement reads. “Instead of hampering transit service for front line workers, the city should be looking at new strategies for addressing the homeless situation,” they wrote.
Earlier this month, the de Blasio administration announced that they would move 6,000 single homeless New Yorkers into hotel rooms to combat crowding at city shelters. Around 4,000 people are street homeless, but around 62,000 people are in the shelter system.
A bill introduced in the City Council last week by Brooklyn Councilmember Stephen Levin and Speaker Corey Johnson would require the city to provide single-room shelters to all homeless New Yorkers who need it to maintain proper social distancing, and would effectively shut down many of the crowded shelters currently operated by the city. The mayor has not yet commented on the legislation.
De Blasio is asking the MTA to close these stations and offer shuttle buses to customers that need to get to the next stations: Coney Island Stillwell Avenue on the D and F, Flatbush Avenue Brooklyn College on the 2 and 5, Jamaica 179th Street on the F train, Jamaica Center, Parsons/Archer on the E, World Trade Center on the E, 96th Street Second Avenue on the Q, Pelham Bay Park on the 6, Van Cortlandt Park 242nd Street on the 1 train, Wakefield 241st Street on the 2 and 5, and Woodlawn on the 4 train.
“It’s really actively harmful to be adding extra policing resources when what people really need are access to a safe private space so they can take the advice of health officials and self-isolate, and socially distance,” Giselle Routhier, the policy director at Coalition for the Homeless said.
“What the city actually needs to be doing in order to help people move into safer places is offer every single homeless person who is struggling to survive on the streets or in the subways access to a hotel room so they have a private space and a private bathroom and appropriately social distance, so they can take care of their basic needs.”
