Michael Goodwin: Mamdanis senseless plan to end homeless camp sweeps will almost certainly make NYCs problem worse

As mayoral transitions go, Zohran Mamdani’s has been relatively quiet.The respite ended last week, as did the fleeting hope that the naive socialist had used the month since his election to get schooled on the complexity of the problems he is about to inherit.No such luck.The new mayor, who takes office Jan.

1, inadvertently revealed he has learned nothing about homelessness when he announced Thursday that his administration will not dismantle the fetid camps springing up around the city.The reason, he claimed, is that Mayor Adams’ policy of removing the camps lacks compassion and has not led to the people involved being placed into permanent housing with appropriate social services.“If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you’re doing to be a success,” Mamdani sneered.He prattled on by saying, “Whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is, because what we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact, it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made.”That’s the sound of a 34-year-old novice spouting campaign slogans as if he’s got some superior insight into a problem that has defied a solution for decades.Because he doesn’t have anything new and realistic to offer, Mamdani will almost certainly make the problem worse instead of even modestly better, and waste gazillions of taxpayer dollars in the process.The core issue is that Mamdani is not a reformer in the traditional sense of someone who wants to repair broken and ineffective operations.Rather, he fancies himself a revolutionary and a leftist savior who sees America and New York as fundamentally flawed and in desperate need of a do-over.Like his core radical supporters, he’d rather burn the house down than paint it.Those qualities make him fundamentally unfit for the job he’s abo...