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Lander Vows to End Street Homelessness for Mentally Ill People as Mayor

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Lander Vows to End Street Homelessness for Mentally Ill People as Mayor

Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor, will unveil his signature campaign issue on Monday: trying to end homelessness on the streets and subways for people with severe mental illness.

The problem has vexed leaders in many large cities, but perhaps none more so than in New York, where a recent series of violent attacks on the subway has rekindled safety concerns and heightened calls for law enforcement and the courts to do more to keep troubled people off the streets.

Mr. Lander’s 75-page-plus plan calls for expanding subway outreach teams and embracing a “housing first” model that has been successful in other cities, including Houston and Denver. Mr. Lander would focus on roughly 2,000 homeless people with serious mental illness and place them in vacant apartments known as single-room-occupancy units, or S.R.O.s.

“New Yorkers are stressed out about lack of safety on the subway and our streets, and a huge amount of that is mentally ill homeless folks who, in some cases, become a real danger, as we’ve seen in recent weeks,” he said. “We dug in and realized this is a solvable problem.”

Mr. Lander said he believed he could get most or all homeless people with serious mental illness off the streets and into some form of supportive housing in his first two years as mayor. The plan would cost about $100 million in the first year, and roughly $30 million per year thereafter, with about half going toward renovating vacant single-occupancy apartments that would provide an array of on-site services.

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The number of people living in the streets and subways of New York City was estimated at 4,140 last year — the highest level in nearly two decades. Rents have soared, and roughly one in eight public school students is homeless.

Those factors have helped make mental health and homelessness major issues in the mayoral race — with more attention focused on the problems after a woman was lit on fire and killed on a train, and subway riders have been pushed onto the tracks by people with mental illness.

Moving some of the city’s most fragile and least stable residents into permanent housing and having them stay requires a herculean level of coordination among multiple stakeholders. They include hospitals; jails; the criminal justice system; nonprofits that offer street medical services and provide housing; and city and state social service agencies and health authorities.

That has not stopped city leaders from trying to navigate that patchwork of bureaucracies.

Last week, during his fourth State of the City speech, Mayor Eric Adams announced a $650 million plan to address street homelessness that includes building new housing for people with serious mental illness and adding 900 “safe haven” beds, which are temporary housing options that offer more privacy and fewer restrictions than typical shelters.

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Kayla Mamelak Altus, a spokeswoman for Mr. Adams, said in a statement that the mayor had “rejected the notion that leaving people to sleep on the street was acceptable” and helped move 8,000 New Yorkers from the subways into shelters, among other efforts. She said there was “still more work to be done,” pointing to the plan that the mayor just unveiled.

“It’s hard to imagine a fraction of this being achieved under Brad Lander, who would prefer to see our streets littered with encampments and our most vulnerable rotting away in filth,” she said.

Other mayoral candidates have pledged to address homelessness, including Jessica Ramos, a state senator from Queens who released a mental health plan last week. Ms. Ramos proposed building 20 community centers that offer therapy and filling vacant supportive housing units.

“As mayor, I will declare a mental health emergency on Day 1 of my administration so we can deliver services to suffering New Yorkers swiftly and effectively,” Ms. Ramos said.

Scott Stringer, a former comptroller, said in a statement that he would remove people who pose a danger to themselves or others and would expand mental health outreach teams. He said that New Yorkers felt “abandoned by city government.”

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Zellnor Myrie, a state senator from Brooklyn, said the Adams administration was “letting too many people who are demonstrating behavioral disturbance fall through the cracks because of a byzantine network of programs and systems.” He said he would expand outreach teams and housing.

The issue has long bedeviled mayors. Bill de Blasio announced a $100 million plan to “end long-term street homelessness” in five years. After eight years as mayor, Mr. de Blasio acknowledged that the issue was his greatest disappointment.

Mr. Lander wants to rely on the “housing first” model that has allowed Houston to move more than 25,000 homeless people into apartments and houses. The approach moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and does not require them to first wean themselves off drugs, complete a 12-step program or get a job. Evidence shows that the strategy keeps people housed, but it is unclear if it saves money or leads to better health outcomes.

New York City has about 40,000 supportive housing units, and most of their occupants moved there from shelters or other temporary housing. Mr. Adams’s administration started a “housing first” pilot program in 2022 that planned to reach 80 adults living on the street. Mr. Lander wants to significantly expand the program.

Mr. Lander’s plan would also create a centralized database for all mental health crisis responses to help prevent people from falling through the cracks.

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Steven Banks, the city’s social services commissioner under Mr. de Blasio, said that Mr. Lander’s plan was “on the right track” based on his experience in city government and his decades at the Legal Aid Society, the main legal provider for poor New Yorkers.

The plan argues that Mr. Adams has failed to adequately address the city’s mental health crisis. It found that the mayor’s broad sweeps of homeless encampments had connected only three people with permanent housing during a period in 2022, and that his administration had not made enough progress on promises to create 360 therapeutic beds for people in jails and to create 15,000 units of supportive housing that include social services.

It also cited a lack of coordination among the various city agencies responsible for caring for those with mental health issues, including hospitals, outpatient treatment teams and homeless shelters — failures highlighted in a 2023 investigation by The New York Times.

Mr. Lander also seeks changes in the rules regarding involuntary hospitalization of people in psychiatric crisis, which are set by the state. Gov. Kathy Hochul said recently that she would push to loosen the standards for involuntary commitment.

Mr. Lander wants hospitals to consider a patient’s history when deciding whether to admit them and to allow nurses to be able to evaluate individuals for involuntary hospitalization, among other changes.

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Mr. Adams, a former police officer who ran for mayor on a public safety platform, has taken a tough stance on clearing the streets of homeless people, but data shows that the population has grown. In January 2022, just after Mr. Adams took office, the city estimated that there were about 3,400 people living in streets and subways.

Another measure of street and subway homelessness is the number of unsheltered people on the caseload of outreach workers. That, too, has gone up under Mr. Adams, to about 3,250 in June 2024, from about 2,050 in June 2021.

Mr. Lander, when asked how he could fix the problem when so many other elected officials have struggled, cited his experience leading a housing nonprofit and his singular focus on the issue. He said he would ask his staff for weekly updates on the city’s “by name list” of people who are homeless to make sure they were on a path to housing.

“I’m making this my No. 1 promise to New Yorkers, and it will be my No. 1 focus when I become mayor,” he said.

Jan Ransom and Amy Julia Harris contributed reporting.

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New York

10 Questions With Brad Lander

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10 Questions With Brad Lander

Brad Lander took a risk last summer when he entered the New York City mayor’s race instead of running for a second term as comptroller.

But he was worried then, he says, about the city’s future under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams — and later about the possibility that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would join the race, as he did.

He has run as an earnest technocrat with a stack of progressive plans. But he has not had the same momentum as Zohran Mamdani, who has risen in the polls and received the first-choice endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (She ranked Mr. Lander third.)

Ahead of the June 24 primary, the leading Democrats in the race visited The New York Times for interviews. We are publishing excerpts from those interviews, and this is the sixth in the series; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

We asked Mr. Lander, 55, questions about 10 themes, with the occasional follow-up, touching on his management of the city’s finances and the two good things he thinks Mr. Adams has done as mayor.

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We’ve written previously about Mr. Lander’s plan to end street homelessness for people with severe mental illness, his criticism of Mr. Cuomo and how he seriously considered becoming a rabbi.

In that order — affordability, public safety, Trump and then just cleaning up corruption and making the city run better. But I’ll put affordability first. That is what’s pushing people out of New York.

The best New York City mayor ever was Fiorello La Guardia, and he was not in my lifetime. Alas, I wish he had been.

The mayors in my lifetime have done great things, but I hesitate to say which one. If you want the mayor who managed the city best — picked up the garbage, made the city function well — Mike Bloomberg certainly did that the best. But the gap in seeing how much income inequality was growing, and stop and frisk, were real.

The best single accomplishment of any mayor is universal prekindergarten, which has been incredible and life-changing for a lot of families, but there were a lot of other issues in the de Blasio administration.

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Yes.

I’m pleased to say I’m open to admitting when I get things wrong.

We did some research on Hudson Yards. I had put some things out when I was the director of the Pratt Center for Community Development that I thought the city was going to get screwed, basically, and not benefit financially. I thought it was all for the developer.

My team in the comptroller’s office did some research, then came to the office and showed me: We’re making between $200 million and $300 million a year. We published it. I put a cover note on that said: “I got this wrong. The research says this is actually working for New York City.”

I live on 13th Street in Park Slope.

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Our mortgage is $3,300 a month.

We do own a car.

We have a Toyota Prius.

I take the subway or bus a couple of times a week.

My mom was a public elementary school guidance counselor. My dad was a legal services lawyer and then a private-sector lawyer. We grew up middle-class.

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I would say we, my wife and I, are upper-middle-class. We made the very fortunate decision to buy a co-op in brownstone Brooklyn for $125,000 in 1996, and that is why we’ve been able to raise our family. We sold it, and then bought our rowhouse on 13th Street, and that has enabled us to live in a neighborhood that we couldn’t afford now, if we hadn’t bought then.

I mean, Eric Adams lies every day and twice on Tuesdays — probably more than that, honestly.

Investments in Israel have grown on my watch, so it’s just a lie. And our pension performance — you can look at it. We’re actually the first to publish it online. They’re right out there for everyone to see.

I do my job. The job of city comptroller, in addition to managing those pension funds well, is oversight of the mayor — is to be a watchdog, and I have been a good watchdog.

We worked to cancel that $432 million DocGo contract. [Mr. Lander criticized the city’s decision in 2023 to grant DocGo, a medical services company, a no-bid contract to help care for an influx of migrants.] Our audits have been hard-hitting in all kinds of places.

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I went early on to him and said: “Let’s find some things to work together on. Let’s try to have a strategy for what to do when it’s my job to say ‘This contract stinks’ or ‘This agency isn’t getting its job done.’”

And he smiled, like he does, but not one time have they been willing to work with us to fix something that’s broken.

I’ll give him two.

NYC Reads — the focus on literacy, phonics education, kids with dyslexia. A lot more to do there. There’s only two of those structured literacy schools. I think there should be one in every district, but it’s a good start.

And trash containerization. It shouldn’t have taken us so long to put lids on the trash cans. There’s a long way to go there as well. And probably Jessie Tisch gets more credit than Eric. But a big part of the job of mayor is hiring good people. He has hired a lot of bad people, but he’s hired some good people as well.

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There’s going to be a couple of big mayoral priorities that I’m going to deliver — ending street homelessness, building a lot of affordable housing, expanding child care and after-school — and then my commissioners and deputy mayors are going to do a whole bunch of great things we haven’t thought about yet. That’s what happens when you hire really good people and have their backs.

My bagel order is an everything bagel with scallion cream cheese, a slice of tomato and lox.

Not toasted.

We’re watching “Extraordinary Attorney Woo.”

Should I pick something that people have heard of? The thing I’ve seen that people should watch is the “Station Eleven” mini-series on HBO. That is like the best thing ever on television. “Watchmen” is a close second.

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Jeffery C. Mays contributed reporting.

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Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

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Test Your Broadway Knowledge, Celebrity Edition

George Clooney is making his Broadway debut in the stage adaptation of his 2005 film “Good Night, and Good Luck.” In 1994, he had his big break on the popular medical ensemble drama “ER.” Which other “ER” actor also starred in a Broadway show this season?

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Revisiting the Sexual Harassment Complaints Against Andrew Cuomo

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Revisiting the Sexual Harassment Complaints Against Andrew Cuomo

Dave Sanders for The New York Times

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Four years ago, Andrew M. Cuomo resigned as governor of New York under a cloud of multiple sexual harassment accusations. He seemed chagrined, embarrassed for acting “in a way that made people feel uncomfortable.”

But as he prepared to make his political return, his tone changed. He said he had been driven out of office by a political hit job. He sued the state attorney general and moved to sue one of his accusers. And he began to portray himself as the victim. “That which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” he told The Daily Beast recently.

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Now, as he runs for mayor of New York City, Mr. Cuomo is treating the scandal as ancient history, even as some of the complaints are still being contested in court.

Here is a look at all of the known sexual harassment allegations, where they stand and what Mr. Cuomo has said about them. (Some of the accusers’ names were shielded, in part or whole, by state investigators in their reports.)

2019-2021

Cuomo’s third term as governor

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Litigation ongoing

Brittany Commisso

Executive assistant, governor’s office

Ms. Commisso said Mr. Cuomo grabbed her buttocks; reached under her blouse and fondled her breast; held her in close, intimate hugs; and asked her about her relationship with her husband, including whether she had ever “fooled around” or had sex with anyone else. She recalled his saying something to the effect of “if you were single, the things I would do to you,” and said he once complimented her on showing “some leg.” During their hugs, she said she would try to lean away from his pelvic area, because she “didn’t want anything to do with whatever he was trying to do at that moment.”

Litigation ongoing
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Charlotte Bennett

Executive assistant, governor’s office

Ms. Bennett, who was 25 at the time, said the governor asked if she had been with older men and if she practiced monogamy, and told her he was lonely and would date someone as young as 22. Mr. Cuomo, she testified, also told her he “wanted to be touched,” and, upon learning that she planned to get a tattoo, advised her to get it on her buttocks. She said she felt as though Mr. Cuomo was grooming her. In a conversation about a speech Ms. Bennett was about to give at her alma mater about sexual assault, she recalled his pointing at her and intoning, “You were raped, you were raped, you were raped and abused and assaulted.” It was “something out of a horror movie,” she texted a colleague that day. “It was like he was testing me.”

State Entity Employee #1

Anonymous state employee

While posing for a photo at a work event in September 2019, the governor “tapped the area” between the employee’s buttocks and thigh, she told investigators, and then moved his fingers upward to “kind of grab that area.” “I felt deflated and I felt disrespected and I felt much, like, smaller and almost younger than I actually am,” she said. She said she had reported the governor’s conduct to investigators to support the women who had come forward with “more extreme” stories and to help establish that they were part of a pattern. “If I could do that, I felt that it was my responsibility to do that,” she said.

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Alyssa McGrath

Executive assistant in the governor’s office

Ms. McGrath said she was taking dictation from the governor in 2019 when she noticed the governor had stopped talking. She said she looked up and saw him staring down her shirt. The governor then asked what was on her necklace, whose pendant was hanging between her breasts and her shirt. She said it was a Virgin Mary and an Italian horn. The governor would also ask questions that made her uncomfortable, she said, including about her divorce and whether, if Ms. Commisso were to cheat on her husband, she would tell anyone.

State Entity Employee #2

Director at State Department of Health

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This state employee, a doctor, performed a televised Covid test on the governor at a March 2020 news conference. Beforehand, he asked her not to put the swab in “so deep that you hit my brain.” She said she would be “gentle but accurate.” “Gentle but accurate,” he responded. “I’ve heard that before.” She found his demeanor flirtatious and understood his statement to have sexual undertones. At the news conference, when the doctor appeared in personal protective equipment, the governor said, “You make that gown look good.” The woman told investigators that she “felt that in my professional standing I should share these facts, whatever they are, in order to support if there are any other women. I can’t say there are or not, who are saying they have been put in an uncomfortable position, or if there is any sexual harassment, that you have the facts that you might need.”

Anna Ruch

Guest at wedding of a senior aide to Mr. Cuomo

At the wedding of an aide, the governor approached Ms. Ruch, shook her hand, and then put his hand on her bare back, she told investigators. She said she grabbed his wrist to move it, at which point the governor said, “Wow, you’re aggressive,” and cupped her face in his hands. “Can I kiss you?” he asked. She turned her head, she said, and he kissed her cheek. (Ms. Ruch was hired by the New York Times photo department in 2022.)

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2015-2019

Cuomo’s second term as governor

Litigation ongoing

Trooper #1

Member of Cuomo’s protective detail

The trooper said she first remembered the governor touching her inappropriately in an elevator going up to his Midtown Manhattan office, where he stood behind her, placed his finger on her neck, and then ran it slowly down her back, touching her bra clasp.“Hey, you,” she recalled him saying. In a separate incident, she recalled him running his palm across her stomach, “between my chest and my privates,” while she was holding a door open for him, an act that made her feel “completely violated.” A witness corroborated the account of Mr. Cuomo touching the trooper’s stomach.
The trooper said he would also say sexually suggestive and sexist things, and told her to keep their conversations private. Among other things, he requested she help him find a girlfriend who could “handle pain,” and he asked why she did not wear a dress, she said.

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Lindsey Boylan

Chief of staff at Empire State Development and then deputy secretary for economic development and special adviser to the governor

Mr. Cuomo paid so much attention to Ms. Boylan that her supervisor concluded the governor had a “crush” on her, both she and her boss testified. Her boss asked if Ms. Boylan needed help managing the situation. She said no. Mr. Cuomo would also compare her to an ex-girlfriend, even allegedly calling Ms. Boylan by that ex-girlfriend’s name. And, she said, he would touch her legs, waist and back.
On an airplane, Ms. Boylan recalled Mr. Cuomo suggesting, seemingly in jest, that they play strip poker. Ms. Boylan’s boss at first claimed not to remember those remarks. After Ms. Boylan sent her boss what he described as a “disparaging” message that he found “threatening,” he corroborated her account. “I’ve been sexually harassed throughout my career,” she told investigators, “but not in a way where the whole environment was set up to feed the predator.”

Virginia Limmiatis

Employee, National Grid

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Ms. Limmiatis said she had been waiting to meet the governor at a 2017 event when Mr. Cuomo approached her and pressed his fingers into her chest, pausing atop each letter of the energy company’s name that adorned her shirt. Then he leaned in so his cheek touched hers and, in her telling, shared his cover story: He would just say there had been a bug on her shirt. Then, she said, he brushed the pretend bug from the area between her shoulder and breast and walked away. After seeing Mr. Cuomo say during a news conference on March 3, 2021, that he had “never touched anyone inappropriately,” she felt compelled to come forward. “I am a cancer survivor,” Ms. Limmiatis told investigators. “I know an oppressive and destructive force when I see it.” 

Kaitlin

Aide in the governor’s office

Kaitlin met Mr. Cuomo at a fund-raiser that her employer, a lobbying firm, was hosting at the Friars Club. When she introduced herself, he pulled her into a dance pose and told her he was going to have her work for the state. Though she told investigators she had never shared her contact information with him or his staff, nine days later she received a voicemail message inviting her to interview for a job in his office, at his behest. It turned out that two of Mr. Cuomo’s aides had been told to find Kaitlin’s contact information. Her colleagues urged her to accept the job, and she did. “I knew that I was being hired because of what I looked like,” she told investigators. The governor paid undue attention to her physical appearance and would comment on her clothes and makeup, she said.

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Stephanie Miner

Former mayor of Syracuse

In a new book, Ms. Miner recounted Mr. Cuomo’s kissing her at public events against her will, actions she believed were an expression of his will to dominate. “His kissing me was about power,” she wrote in “Madam Mayor: Love and Loss in an American City.” She went on: “I never viewed it as sexual. We were gladiators in a public ring and that’s how he showed he was boss.”

2011-2015

Cuomo’s first term as governor

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Ana Liss

Aide in governor’s office

Mr. Cuomo would kiss her cheek and would almost always address her as “sweetheart” or “darling,” Ms. Liss said. He spoke to her, she said, like she was “a little girl, almost.” She said she considered Mr. Cuomo’s behavior improper, but not sexual harassment. (A judge, apparently referring to Ms. Liss, said a complainant’s legal conclusion on that matter was “irrelevant.”) Ms. Liss said she had spoken up because “the other young women that had come forward with more egregious allegations weren’t being believed, and I believed them, and I wanted to share an account that was less egregious and spoke to the broader culture that allowed for the things that happened to them to happen to them.”

1997-2001

Cuomo’s tenure as HUD secretary

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Karen Hinton

Consultant to U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

While Ms. Hinton was working as a consultant for the Housing Department under Mr. Cuomo, he held her in a “very long, too long, too tight, too intimate” hug, she told The Washington Post. She told WNYC that Mr. Cuomo was “aroused” during the embrace. Years after the encounter, Ms. Hinton worked for Mr. Cuomo’s antagonist, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City.

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