NYC pols beg Gov. Hochul for more psych beds to ease street homelessness crisis
New York City lawmakers are ramping up pressure on Gov.Kathy Hochul to reopen long-shuttered psychiatric hospitals, arguing a severe shortage of long-term beds is feeding the city’s homelessness and public safety crises.The City Council’s Common Sense Caucus, a group of bipartisan lawmakers, sent a letter to Hochul Wednesday urging her to bring back large state-run facilities in the five boroughs to ease the strain on the Big Apple’s shelter system.“Removing the mentally ill from the shelter system would ..
help other unhoused New Yorkers to feel safer when entering the system, and would enhance public safety by decreasing the amount of mental health calls our police and EMTs need to respond to every day,” the group wrote.The lawmakers argued that the current capacity at psychiatric hospitals leaves vulnerable New Yorkers “wandering the streets and subways at all hours.”New York City’s latest HOPE survey found 4,504 people living on the streets, in parks and in the subway system on the night of Jan.28, 2025.
That one-night snapshot, the city’s main measure of street homelessness, marks a 9% jump from the 4,140 unsheltered people counted a year earlier.“What we’re seeing on our streets is absolutely inhumane,” Council Minority Leader Joann Ariola said Thursday.“We have facilities across the state that can be reopened to provide real, long term care to the mentally ill, but Albany is refusing to allow it.
This is shameful.“Instead, the governor seems content to let those buildings rot, and allow our homeless population to continue to needlessly suffer,” the Queens Republican said.Ariola and the other city lawmakers want Hochul to reopen facilities including Pilgrim State on Long Island, Middletown State in Orange County, Manhattan Psychiatric Center on Wards Island and Holliswood Hospital in Queens.For decades, New York has steadily shifted away from such large state psychiatric hospitals toward community-based care.New York had just o...