,The country’s largest city is instructing officials to confront and involuntarily hospitalize people experiencing severe mental illness on the streets, New York City Mayor Eric Adams said Tuesday.
The aggressive move to get people with mental illnesses off the streets comes in a year when rates of homelessness in his Tuesday address New York exacerbated shelters, and public concern surrounding crimes involving homeless people spiked. In Adams described city residents with severe and untreated mental illness who sleep on subway cars and park benches and said their living situations are “a crisis we see all around us.”
Despite the overwhelming demand for low-income housing in New York and crisis decades in the making, nearly 2,600 apartments for people with mental illnesses or those that are unhoused sat vacant in the city as of this month, The New York Times reported.
