As New York City’s homeless problem grows–over a hundred thousand are currently in the city’s care, more than half of whom are illegal aliens, aka asylum seekers–Mayor Adams is still looking for a home. So far, he’s tried commandeered hotels, tent cities, upstate towns, Canada, disused cruise ships, dispersion throughout the country, rooms in private homes, etc. Most recently, Hizzoner has been focussing on a vacant racetrack and, ironically, a dilapidated insane asylum.
The Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens has been city property since 1870. At that time, it was used as housing for the state’s National Guard. In 1918, it was turned into a farm colony for the Brooklyn State Hospital for the insane. By the 1950s, its population peaked at 8,000. Then the national deinstitutionalization program kicked in, which has flooded New York’s–and America’s–streets with the mentally ill. During the next four decades, the number of patients dropped from 5,000 to 500. Though its population plummeted, Creedmoor’s problems skyrocketed:
By 1974, the hospital was completely out of control, with on-campus crime reaching horrifying numbers: three rapes, 22 assaults, 52 fires, 130 burglaries, six suicides, a shooting, a riot, and an attempted murder occurred within 20 months of each other. And then, in 1984, a patient died after being restrained in a straitjacket and beaten by a staff member with a blackjack. (Source: Atlas Oscura)
According to a 2013 Atlas Oscura article, by that time only a few hundred residents remained, some of them mere squatters, and the facilities had degenerated into filth and squalor.
Now, Mayor Adams is looking to open Creedmoor and the Aqueduct Racetrack (also in Queens) to his migrant charges. Plans are being made to erect huge tent shelters, each housing about a thousand migrants, at each location. The tents will resemble other, already-failed shelters at Orchard Beach in The Bronx and on Randall’s Island.
A spokesman for the mayor’s office explained that, although the Biden administration is claiming a drop in new migrants entering the U.S., many of the most recent newcomers (3,100 came to NYC in just five days earlier this month) are coming from other parts of the U.S.:
A lot of the folks that we’re getting now are coming from other parts of the United States, where other people in other cities are running out of space. Since we have a front door that is open, people are finding themselves here.
That open front door is costing the city a bundle: an estimated $4.3 billion by the end of the year. If Mayor Adams gets his way, the cost of New York’s much ballyhooed generosity will be passed along to us all. As with everything else in the Big Apple, paying for its virtue-signalling bragging rights will not come cheap.
For more, see the National Review website.