Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot seems to have a magic wand that eliminates homelessness. Actually, I should say it eliminates unhoused people.
About a year ago, people began squatting in tents under a viaduct near where I live. And then one day about a month ago, the entire encampment was gone, without so much as a crumpled up paper bag left behind.
New York Mayor Eric Adams seems to be taking the same out-of-sight-out-of-mind approach to the growing homelessness crisis in his city. There’s been a lot of talk about his recent policy directive making it easier for people who are living on the streets and having a mental health crisis to be involuntarily rounded up and hospitalized. The police are now authorized to take away any unhoused person who is in mental health distress a degree where they cannot meet “their own basic human needs.”
This strikes me as an ominously regressive strategy for many reasons. I fear it will further stigmatize mental health instability, which is never a good thing. Not seeking help for a mental health issue that needs professional attention is as futile and harmful as not seeking help for a physical health issue. You can’t ignore it away. Things will only get worse. But if you fear that revealing your mental health crisis may result in your involuntary confinement, you’ll have all the more incentive to pretend like nothing is wrong.
I fear the revival of the idea that it’s appropriate to remove from the community disabled people who cannot meet their own basic human needs. What exactly does that mean?
If this policy is intended to look like crime fighting, it is ill-conceived and lazy. Research has shown that a vast majority of people living with mental illnesses do not disproportionately commit crimes and, in fact, are more likely to be crime victims. Taking people with mental health problems off the streets does not remotely equate with taking criminals off the streets.
But mostly, I fear the revival of the idea that it’s appropriate to remove from the community disabled people who cannot meet their own basic human needs. What exactly does that mean? Because I have a physical disability and use a motorized wheelchair, I can’t do essential daily tasks for myself like getting out of bed and getting dressed. But I get assistance in doing these things from a crew of people that I hire and supervise. Their $17-an-hour wage for assisting me is paid via a state program funded largely by Medicaid.
But before such programs existed, disabled people like me were considered unable to meet our own basic human needs and thus we were segregated away in nursing homes or other institutions. The problem was a lack of public support systems.
Adams’ approach seems like a retreat toward that same mentality of negligence that serves no one. It may give those of us who aren’t living on the street and having a mental health crisis a temporary feeling of safety, but it does nothing to address the root of the problem.
Life in the big city is a big hustle as it is, and having mental health troubles on top of that makes it easier to be left behind. It can be nearly impossible for someone in this situation to make enough money just to pay minimal rent, especially with gentrification running rampant. The tent city under the viaduct in my neighborhood was right around the corner from new high-rise buildings, where exorbitant rents are charged for tiny apartments.
Helping people with mental health issues to stay off the streets requires a robust, long-term commitment to developing supportive services, like affordable housing. Instead of finding real solutions, I’m seeing a lot of punitive policies that aim to sweep the problem away, as if it was never there.