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Mayor Eric Adams swiped back at critics of his newly-announced $650 million plan to tackle mental illness and homelessness Wednesday — saying “adults come up with real solutions.”
The mayor was reacting to criticism by City Comptroller and 2025 Democratic primary opponent Brad Lander, who slammed Adams’ ambitious initiative as half-baked after he unveiled it in his “State of the City” address last week.
“Unless you really understand proper governance, while you’re dealing with an immediate problem, you got to build out for the future problem, so anyone who will attempt to state that we’re sitting on our hands while we build out something… is not listening,” Hizzoner snapped during a press conference where he provided more details on his proposal.
The mayor had announced a special new facility to house and treat mentally ill New Yorkers — and he said Wednesday he was aiming for the 100-bed space, dubbed “Bridge to Home,” to be built by fiscal year 2027.
Adams also provided a timeline for the 900 new “Safe Haven” beds he promised during his “State of the City,” saying those would start being added to existing shelters across the Big Apple by the summer, at a cost of $106 million.
Lander, who recently unveiled his own plan to tackle homelessness, had slammed Adams after his Jan. 9 speech for not specifically addressing the issue of people living on the subways.
“I didn’t hear a plan for subway homelessness,” he said at the time, adding, “We do need more Safe Haven beds but promising 900 more without any plan or any site seems unlikely to me. One new building five years from now is not going to get anybody else housed.”
Adams snapped back on Wednesday that it was “great for him (Lander) to have all these grand ideas, but the reality is, every time the adults come up with real solutions … the cult attacks us.
“The adults make the decision, the cults attack us,” he said. “Listen, you can’t say cult without Brad.”
Officials said the “innovative” new facility proposed by Adams will be part of a $13 million pilot program run by Health + Hospitals and will provide shelter to people leaving psychiatric facilities but who are not yet ready to fully live alone without support to continue their meds and treatment.
The “Bridge to Home” facility will offer psychiatric care, substance abuse treatment and help for homeless mentally ill New Yorkers to secure permanent housing, officials said.
While the city acknowledged it has yet to identify a location for the new site — Dr. Mitchell Katz, the head of NYC Health + Hospitals boldly said Wednesday that he “doesn’t anticipate any problems” finding a spot.
“There is, of course, a public process we will engage with the neighborhood about the site of the future facility,” he said.
“People recognize that these people are on the street and having them be in a safe facility, I think will, turn out to be a very popular solution to communities.”
Under Adams’ proposal, the city will also be investing $6 million to add 100 beds to specifically serve runaway and homeless youth ages 21-24.
Lander took the opportunity Wednesday to again blast Adams, calling the announcement “far-too-little, far-too-late.”
“His administration delayed the 360 secure detention beds that were already supposed to be online at Bellevue and other H+H facilities by over two years,” Lander said referring to a pledge from former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration to secure hundreds of therapeutic beds inside city hospitals for detainees, which has yet to come to fruition.
“The Safe Haven beds he is now promising won’t be online for another two years,” Lander noted.
He also touted his own “Safer for All” plan — which aims to get about 2,000 mentally ill homeless people off the streets — as a model that is already working in cities around the country and that can “be implemented much more quickly.”
The Adams administration said it has moved over 8,000 New Yorkers from the subways into shelters, connected 2,800 homeless individuals to permanent housing and, in fiscal year 2024 helped a record 18,500 households transition from shelters to stable homes.
“We’ve also doubled our outreach staff, launched the Partnership Assistance for Transit Homelessness initiative, and expanded Subway Co-Response Outreach Teams to connect more people to care,” said Adams Press Secretary Kayla Mamelak in a statement.
“It’s hard to imagine a fraction of this being achieved under Brad Lander — who would prefer to see our streets littered with encampments and our most vulnerable rotting away in filth.”
English (US)