Eric Adams Solved Homelessness By Throwing Away Their Stuff

The new mayor of New York is Eric Adams. And Eric Adams sucks. Eric Adams is a nasty, egg-headed ghoul who wears crystal healing bracelets on the wrist of the hand he uses to choke the most vulnerable citizens of New York City. He was elected on the power of panicked rich people ginned up on cable news and the void left by a progressive movement that managed to somehow split a ranked choice ticket. He’s a cardboard cut-out of a leader that attempts to solve every problem with a hammer. What I’m trying to say is, I don’t particularly care for the man.

His latest undertaking has been New York’s rising homeless problem, which is a very data-driven way to look at a huge amount of people brought to ruin by a global pandemic. His “solution” to this problem brings into deep relief his short-minded thinking and lack of semblance of anything beyond surface-level processing that makes for a terrible leader of any kind. You see, you would think that if someone were to tackle the housing problems New York faces, you would first lay out the root causes of the problem and attempt to solve them. For example, a lack of affordable or transitory housing for people who are in understandable financial turmoil in a period where the entire country is feeling the crunch. The solution, then, to reducing the amount of unhoused people on the street, would be to create places for them to go.

Whether out of cruelty or stupidity, Eric Adams has created a solution to the city’s homeless crisis that contains no actual clearly defined end result. Here is Adams’ master plan:

STEP 1: Carry out “street sweeps” across the city, where police are sent out to destroy any “encampment”, defined by the city as “a structure to live under.” This can include everything from tents to arranged cardboard boxes.

That’s it. I’m no master tactician, but I do believe most effective plans have at least two steps. In fact, a plan with only a single step I don’t think actually qualifies as a plan. Explaining a plan should always include the phrase “and then.” This is a level of stupidity bordering on a lack of object permanence. 

As you can imagine, this math doesn’t exactly add up. If you throw a homeless New Yorker’s tent into a trash compactor, you now have a homeless person standing next to you with no tent. This might be a good plan if New York had an unoccupied tent problem. As you’d expect, city homeless outreach programs have decried the action, which I refuse to refer to as a plan any further. The biggest reason being the obvious–that it’s paired with no form of expansion of the city’s single-occupancy housing options, or reform of communal shelters that are known to be unsanitary and dangerous.

But hey! Maybe I’m wrong! Maybe I’m just not privy to some deep behind-the-scenes work that strings all this together! Let’s see what Parker Wolf, whose shelter and belongings were thrown away when police recently cleared encampments under the BQE, told Gothamist:

“…planned to stay outside Monday night with the remainder of the blankets they’d salvaged.”

“Making us move doesn’t make less homeless people,” he said. “We’re gonna be in a different place.”

Problem solved! Thank you Eric Adams! A true visionary thinker!

Perhaps the most ridiculous, casually evil statement from Adams is as follows: Adams says “ you can’t build a miniature house made out of cardboard on the streets. That’s inhumane.” To Adams, it seems, the idea of a man living under a cardboard box is inhumane, but taking that man’s cardboard box away is a solution.

Tonight's low temperature forecast for NYC, by the way? 28 degrees.

Top Image: Public Domain/Pixabay