NYC subway safety plan fails to resolve issue of the homeless

On Wednesday morning, a homeless man was sleeping on a platform at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, covered only by a thin layer of orange tinfoil.

About 20 minutes later, two police officers arrived, lifted the tinfoil and asked him to move. He stood up slowly, put on his shoes, grabbed his personal items, walked down the stairs, and lay down in another corner of the station.

One month after New York City Mayor Eric Adams announced a safety plan to prevent people from living in the city's subway stations, some platforms and trains have fewer homeless people. However, many needy people are still taking shelter in the subway system.

On Feb 18, Adams and New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced that over 1,000 people who shelter in the United States' largest subway system would be forced to leave, following an increase in violent crime including several high-profile attacks linked to homeless people.

"No more smoking, no more doing drugs, no more sleeping, no more barbecues, no more just doing whatever you want," Adams said while detailing his subway safety plan. "Those days are over. Swipe your MetroCard, ride the system, get off at your destination."

But it is hard to transform a massive subway system with 472 stations and thousands of train cars in service.

During morning rush hour at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn Streets Station in Brooklyn, a homeless man sleeps on a chair on a platform as commuters swarm the busy station.

At the busy Pennsylvania Station－identified by City Hall as one of six subway stations that have the "highest need" for homeless outreach－police and outreach teams approach homeless people and ask them to leave. However, the requests only results in them moving to another part of the station.

On Wednesday, China Daily spotted one outreach team in Pennsylvania Station. The team consisted of four people; three social workers wearing orange vests with clipboards and one health worker wearing a black vest.

Joon Park, the health worker who provides assistance, is holding a flyer that lists 17 agencies that provide homeless people with entitlements, benefits and advocacy, such as housing and job training. "If they accept our help, we will transport them to a certain location," he said.

If homeless people refuse to accept help, the outreach team will try to make contact again in the future, Park said.

Advocates and social workers say it can take months of engagement and trust-building to convince the chronically homeless to live in a shelter.

J.C., 34, is a US military veteran who sleeps in the subway system and says he feels lucky if he gets an hour of sleep. He has stored all his personal belongings in a subway tunnel near Bryant Park in downtown Manhattan for three years. "All the subway workers there know those are a veteran's stuff. They don't move it," he said.

The last time J.C. went to a homeless shelter was in 2016. He said he almost killed someone in the shelter because he suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. "I don't feel safe staying in a shelter, I don't feel other people are safe if I stay in a shelter," J.C. told China Daily.

Civil rights lawyers and advocates for the homeless say that New York City's new subway safety plan is fatally flawed as it doesn't adequately address the question of where the homeless should go.

"It's a very magical kind of thinking that we're going to get people out of the subway when you don't have any place to put them," Beth Haroules, senior staff attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union, told NBC New York.

"You can remove that person but what are you doing for the person? You make the neighborhood feel better or you make people on the subway feel better, but you're not solving the problem."