De Blasio proves he’s clueless about the homeless crisis
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MICHAEL GOODWIN
If you’ve ever watched Mayor Bill de Blasio talk about the homeless problem but can’t figure out what he believes is the cause, you are not alone. The mayor himself is confused about what he believes.
Consider his contradictory comments on successive days. On Monday, he launched a battalion of lawyers to protect tenants, saying “too many families are becoming homeless for purely economic reasons” and that an additional $12 million in legal aid would “help thousands of New Yorkers facing eviction or harassment stay in their homes.”
City Hall’s press release included praise for the mayor from a score of elected Democrats and legal-aid types, most of whom painted landlords as greedy and evil and tenants as their innocent victims.
“The affordable-housing crisis and rise in homelessness are inextricably linked, and at the core of both lies the insidious harassment of tenants by bad-acting landlords,” said Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams.
Congresswoman Nydia Velazquez echoed the sentiment, saying her office often gets complaints from “working families” who face “harassment from unscrupulous landlords seeking to force them from their homes.”
As narratives go, this one is easy to grasp — and simple to the point of being simplistic. Stop illegal evictions, de Blasio and the liberal chorus claim, and the homeless problem will be solved.
Alas, even the mayor is having trouble swallowing the fiction. After first embracing the good-vs.-evil stereotype again yesterday, he suddenly did an about-face to lavish praise on landlords.
In testimony before a state legal panel, de Blasio first boasted about spending millions “to protect tenants facing eviction and harassment by unscrupulous landlords, which is a major cause of homelessness.” Suddenly, the mayor had second thoughts. “At this moment, I must note that the vast majority of landlords do follow the law, and treat their tenants with respect. We are focused on the unscrupulous few,” he said.
Say what? You can’t logically claim greedy landlords are a “major cause of homelessness,” then admit the problem is limited to an “unscrupulous few.” By any standard, a few landlords cannot be a major cause of 60,000 people living in shelters.
Which gets us to the real issue. De Blasio’s flip-flop reveals that he simply doesn’t have a clue about what’s driving the homeless numbers. He’s previously blamed former mayors, the governor, the Legislature, Washington — he’s got a list of scapegoats a mile long, but not a clear understanding of the problem.
His solution then is to fall back on his default position for everything: inequality. He trots out his class-and-race warfare rhetoric and throws more taxpayer millions at the illusion, even while conceding that added legal services won’t make much of a difference.
The episode would make for great comedy if it weren’t so tragic. It exposes the mayor again as a pure ideologue, someone who sees every problem through the prism of what he already believes.
He believes that poor people are poor because the system is rigged against them and that successful people are successful because the system is rigged in favor of them.
When those myths are applied to homelessness, the caricatures are assigned predictable roles. All tenants are innocent victims of landlords who enjoy evicting and harassing them.
In fact, as numerous studies show, homelessness is not just an economic problem. Most often, it’s a behavior problem. Whether it’s mental illness, drugs or alcohol addictions or family dysfunction and breakdown, the cause is not usually a simple matter of dollars and cents.
Moreover, trying to force landlords to keep tenants who are destructive or who don’t pay their rent or who can’t live on their own turns private housing into a government utility. That’s a sure-fire way to turn that housing into tomorrow’s slums.
In that context, it’s worth noting that the mayor, who lives rent-free in Gracie Mansion, owns two houses in Brooklyn that he leases for at least $5,000 a month each.If he’s so keen on forcing landlords to house poor families who might otherwise be homeless, why doesn’t he lead by example? That would be new.
Missed a spot, O
Headline: “Taliban Seize Control of Key Afghan City.”
That’s either a mistake, or the Taliban didn’t get the White House memo that the tide of war is receding.
Syria policy a bam shame
The United Nations showdown demonstrated just how badly President Obama is being outplayed by Vladimir Putin. Hold onto your hat, the worst is yet to come.
Claiming to be lining up a coalition to fight the Islamic State, Putin is also aligned with Iran and Iraq to keep the butcher of Syria, Bashar al-Assad, in power.
This axis of evil would be trouble anywhere, but the involvement of Iraq adds a unique dimension. We are helping to prop up that government and launching airstrikes against the Islamic State in Iraq, an effort that involves giving Iraq’s military our intelligence data.
But The Wall Street Journal reports that Iraqi officials say they will now give that data to the Russian military. That means our intelligence will be used to keep Assad in power.
So more than four years after Obama demanded that Assad resign, the Syrian dictator not only survives, he has gained powerful allies. And we have effectively become one of them, even as Obama still insists Assad must go.
To read again his initial demand that Assad quit in August 2011 is to appreciate the consequences of Obama’s failure to act. “For the sake of the Syrian people, the time has come for President Assad to step aside,” he said then.
At the time, The Washington Post reported that “hundreds of Syrian civilians” had been killed by the government.
Now the dead are said to number 250,000, with 4 million Syrians driven into exile. Yet Obama was at the UN Monday, sounding very much like it was still 2011. He demanded “a managed transition away from Assad into a new leader,” yet again offered no plan for making that actually happen.
Putin is a brutal tyrant, but he has a policy — and a forceful plan to deliver results. Therein lies the difference between a leader and a charlatan.
Blas challenger talks good cents
Harlem pastor Michel Faulkner is the first New Yorker to announce he will challenge Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2017. A black Republican, Faulkner had some powerful answers to questions posed by cityandstate.com. A sampling:
“When I hear the mayor talking about the wealthy and blaming them for the woes of the poor, and then saying the solution is to tax them and distribute it to the poor so that they can have what they need to be whole — I don’t believe that.
“That’s garbage . . . That is a liberal philosophy which has kept my people in bondage for far too long.”
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