New York City Fading Back Into Dangerous Streets

Bunks in a Seven Cent Lodging House, c. 1890

One element of history frequently forgotten that contributed to the homeless population is the destruction of flophouses in the name of eliminating neighborhood blight There used to be for many, not all, of the homeless cheap places to sleep. They are all gone now in the name of good. George Bernard Shaw, "The road to hell is paved with good intentions." Pre-Homeric Greek philosopher Cleobulous, "The chief source of evil among men is excessive good."

[From article]
In the 1960s, the destruction of the state mental hospital system—inspired in part by flower-child sentimentality and in part by a cynical ploy to dump the mentally ill off the state budget and onto some other government’s ledger—created a disaster whose cruelty historians will add to the list of other barbarities that the supposedly enlightened, supposedly progressive twentieth century perpetrated.
[. . .]
he smashed Xiaoming Huang, 51, across the face with a two-by-four, without a word of warning, as the Chinese tourist walked by the Grand Hyatt Hotel on 42nd Street, where he had been staying, inspires nothing but outrage. What you see here is not madness but evil. [. . .] It took so much effort by so many people to clear up the human wreckage that so many years of liberal “compassion” had created in a dying New York. And to see it all—I can’t put it any better than the esteemed New York Post—“pissed away” by a mayor not smart or perceptive enough to have learned one thing from the experience of the last 20 years, since his own personal demons have left him stuck in the politics of the 1950s and 1960s, is tragic. It is so hard to build; so easy to destroy.
[. . .]
Listen, Mayor: the first job of government is to keep the people safe in their homes and in the streets. If you can’t do that as a municipal chief executive, you are a flop. Equality is not the job of government, unless you are a Communist, in which case equality usually comes at the barrel of a gun or the end of a noose. And voters of New York, please learn this lesson too, despite your attachment to FDR and the New Deal or your seductive professor of race-class-and-gender studies at Brown or Wesleyan. New York needs a realistic mayor. We don’t have one.

http://www.city-journal.org/2015/eon0727mm.html

MYRON MAGNET
Order, Please, Not Utopia
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July 27, 2015