New Yorkers are still sounding the alarm about their neighborhoods being flooded by homeless people brazenly doing drugs, defecating, shoplifting, and even having sex on public benches.
Councilman Erik Bottcher (D), whose Manhattan district includes the neighborhoods of Greenwich Village, Chelsea, Hell’s Kitchen, Hudson Square, Flatiron, Times Square, the Theater District, and the Garment District, begged Mayor Eric Adams (D) for help in a recent letter.
“Our neighborhoods need help right now,” he wrote a letter, obtained by the New York Post. “The status quo cannot be allowed to continue.”
Large portions of the borough’s West Side are “particularly dire,” Bottcher has observed.
A local security guard told the outlet that the homeless abuse drugs “all day and all night” outside of Eighth Avenue’s Holiday Inn hotel.
“It’s crazy out here,” the weary man said. “They even have sex out here on the benches. They pee and defecate here.”
In between disposing of used drug needles, hotel staff have been forced to activate their outdoor sprinkler systems to deter the derelicts — which backfired after they began using them as public showers.
“We turn the sprinklers on to move them and they come inside cursing us out,” said front desk supervisor Rocky Caban. “They try to hit us and everything. We got the guard outside to try to stop them from coming inside.”
Pointing to a man nodding off on a nearby bench, Caban said, “Everyday we gotta go through this.”
“I see the same people every day. I see them get picked up and go in an ambulance and the next day they’re back outside,” he complained to the Post.
Nicola Krebs, a tourist visiting New York with her family from New Zealand, told the outlet that she will not stay at the Midtown Holiday Inn again.
“I love New York City,” the 31-year-old vacationer said, adding that it is “a bit off-putting with so many homeless people… They should actually give them help.”
Watch: NYPD Says We’re Arresting People with 50, 100 Arrests “All the Time”
According to Councilman Bottcher, the police can only do so much when they are stretched thin and no policies have been made to clean up the streets.
“We have people who have been arrested 50 or 100 times without any meaningful intervention,” Bottcher told the Post. “At what point does anyone do anything to interrupt that cycle?”
Meanwhile, locals frequently witness acts of violence, vandalism, theft, and open drug sales.
In his message to Adams, Bottcher asked him to support a bill to require the placement of licensed social workers in all NYPD precincts.
“Manhattan’s West Side is in need of this program now,” the councilman wrote.
As New York Post reporters walked through the neighborhoods to observe its conditions, they noticed more than a dozen “apparently mentally unwell” people sleeping on benches or walking barefoot through Washington Square Park, a “junkie wandering with a needle sticking out of his hand” near Penn Station, and other horrifying sights of squalor.
Another local security guard told the outlet that a nearby methadone clinic attracts many of the homeless to the area, but they end up abusing street drugs anyway.
“They say, ‘I’m going to self medicate and buy heroin,’” he said. “They’d rather live on the street than a homeless shelter because people get robbed. People get stabbed. They’re more safe on the street.”
NYPD crime data obtained by the publication revealed that major felonies in Midtown North shot up by 71 percent from July 22-28 compared to the same week last year.
Only exacerbating the problem are the staggering 193 government-run migrant shelters that have opened up in the Big Apple as a result of the mass migration crisis.
“These shelters are being placed in the poorest part of communities,” Councilwoman Julie Won (D), whose district is in Western Queens, told the Post in early July. “[The Adams administration] needs to spread them out, so you’re not hurting communities – especially low-income communities.”
Watch: Adams Says We Need Deportation of Criminal Migrants, “They’re Doing Violent Acts”
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