New York City appears to be on the verge of replicating Los Angeles by establishing its own crime-ridden skid row in the form of a 12-block-long homeless encampment that continues to grow on Manhattan’s West Side.
Those who live, work and visit nearby are telling at least one news outlet that the city is failing to address the tents, trash and reported illegal activity in the alarming stretch of vagrant dwellings between the Intrepid Museum and the Jacob Javitz Center.
“I think it’s embarrassing,” said Joan G., a woman who asked for anonymity told Fox News Digital near the encampment.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, meanwhile, told reporters he’d do something about the mess but failed to give a timeline, the New York Post reported this week.
“This site has been noticed and it will be cleared,” the mayor said. “As with any site once we notice there is seven days until the point of clearing. Each of those seven days is characterized by outreach from city workers looking to connect those who are present with services, whether it be services at a shelter, medical services, or supportive services beyond that.”
He did not say when the seven-day waiting period kicks in, according to the Post report.
The massive Manhattan encampment now means that America’s two largest cities feature shocking skid rows that represent third-world-like conditions rather than the best of what two of America’s largest centers of finance, entertainment, and commerce have to offer.
Historically, New York’s skid row was the Bowery neighborhood, but this was cleaned up and gentrified in recent decades. Until the new 45th street encampment, there hasn’t been a single area of such concentrated vagrant blight in Manhattan.
Los Angeles’s long-established skid row downtown has expanded this decade as well as spawning other homeless tent encampments around the city that began popping up around the time of the Covid pandemic.
New Yorkers appear to be in shock over the size and condition of the Manhattan encampment, Fox Digital found.
A nearby construction-site security guard who identified himself only as “Joe the Dog Man” also criticized the city’s response. “I just don’t think enough is being done,” he said.
“They gotta clean them up, they gotta keep on top of them,” Joe said. “This seven-day stuff, or whatever it is now, is really not working.”
Mayor Mamdani stopped encampment sweeps when he took office, as he had promised to do in his campaign. Later he introduced a “revised removal policy that gives homeless-services teams seven days to conduct outreach before an encampment can be dismantled,” Fox Digital reported.
City outreach workers were seen visiting the encampment this week but primarily only collected trash, according to the Fox report.
Encampments, like those in Los Angeles, bring more than “homeless” people, critics say. As L.A. mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt said repeatedly in his unsuccessful campaign, encampments don’t indicate a housing problem. They are the result of a drug problem.
He told an L.A. ABC affiliate in May:
Well, they’re not homeless. They’re drug addicts. Most of these people are addicted to fentanyl and meth. This isn’t Spencer making that up. There is places for all of these people to sleep in L.A. No matter what anybody tells you, we have housing and shelter for everyone that’s living on the street. They are choosing to be on the streets because they want to do drugs. They don’t want rules. They don’t want to listen.
“It’s terrible,” Joe the security guard said, confirming that view. “Drugs, prostitution, and everything else in between.”
He wants New York police to act to solve the problem.
There were also reports of vagrants drawing power from utility poles, which resulted in comments from the New York Police Department (NYPD) earlier this week.
“The NYPD has not been given the green light to clean this encampment up, but we are ready to do so,” an NYPD spokesperson told Fox News Digital.
Breitbart contributor Lowell Cauffiel is the best-selling author of the Los Angeles crime novel Below the Line and nine other crime novels and nonfiction titles. See lowellcauffiel.com for more.
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