New York

NYC’s Involuntary Removal of Mentally Ill Homeless People Raises Questions

Published

1 year ago

March 7, 2025

NYC’s Involuntary Removal of Mentally Ill Homeless People Raises Questions

In November 2022, Justin Brannan, a city councilman who represents a big patch of South Brooklyn, was worrying about a woman who had been living in the same spot on the street in his district for so long — at least since he took office in 2018 — that she had been immortalized on Google Maps. Appearing to be in her 70s and missing many teeth, she had resisted services in the past, but now the councilman had reason to hope she would get the help she needed.

At the time, Mayor Eric Adams was rolling out a controversial directive known as involuntary removal. It explicitly authorized outreach teams, police officers, nurses, emergency medical workers and others to get people with mental illness severe enough that they could not meet “their own basic human needs” off the streets whether they consented or not, if they posed a threat to themselves that seemed close at hand.

But how were these decisions being made? Mr. Brannan felt that the woman who had been living on a sidewalk in Bensonhurst behind “a fortress of cardboard boxes,” as he put it to the city, fit the criteria. Surely, she was a danger to herself if not necessarily in immediate terms. So he was baffled to receive an email from City Hall indicating that the outreach team who approached her had reasoned that she was fine. The team noted in its assessment that she had been fixated on getting a dental appointment, which seemed to be the basis of its determination of her stability, along with the fact that she “was also inquiring about getting a metro card!”

The back-and-forth with city agencies went on for months, with Mr. Brannan asking that the woman be taken into shelter and connected with housing. Administrators explained that she had repeatedly refused help and that she could not be made to accept it, which seemed to contravene the mayor’s policy.

“I’m not sure how we can say she can care for herself,” Mr. Brannan wrote at one point, “if she has been living outside a shuttered fruit store for four years.”

The entwined crises around homelessness and mental health are among the central issues of the mayoral campaign; how they are resolved, or not, may well define what New York becomes. The attendant issues are ethical as much as they are political: At what point is overriding personal choice justified for the benefit of both the individual and the civic whole? Advocates for civil liberties have been saying the same thing since the Koch administration: never.

“There’s a question in front of all of us,” said Sandy Nurse, a member of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus who represents East New York. “What does it mean to forcibly remove people when you’re not sure that they have a mental health issue?” Implicit in that question is the absence of consensus about how mental health issues present when the observable behavior is not unmistakably wild or erratic.

“Field workers, outreach workers — they don’t believe that removal is appropriate for someone who is just homeless,” Ms. Nurse said. And they are the ones making the initial judgments. The woman Mr. Brannan was concerned about was suffering, in his view. But in the opinion of those who approached her, she seemed resilient and sane despite the choices she made.

Proposed legislation in Albany that is being promoted right now by both the Adams administration and Gov. Kathy Hochul would make it easier to conduct removals in cases of extreme self-neglect, when people might not even recognize the threat they pose to their own well-being. Though removals are often conducted by police officers, they are by no means arrests. Between 2023 and 2024, the city conducted more than 7,000, most of them — 70 percent — originating in private houses and shelters after someone made a call on behalf of a relative or client in distress.

The system is hampered by a shortage of psychiatric beds in public hospitals as well as a shortage of psychiatrists. But the attention paid to violent crimes at the hands of mentally disturbed homeless people has obscured some of the progress the city has made. Since the beginning of the Adams administration, 1,500 “low-barrier beds” have been added to the system. These are quieter alternatives to congregate shelters, which many homeless people reject because they find them terrifying.

Close to 700 more of these beds are expected to become available by the end of this year. Last year, roughly 1,200 people who had been living on the street were moved into permanent housing, Molly Wasow Park, the city’s social services commissioner, told me. At the same time, it is hard to make gains: During the same period, 1,100 people were discharged from state psychiatric hospitals — a revolving door that Ms. Park said she found “infuriating.”

Last May, Ms. Park appeared at a City Council budget hearing at which Mr. Brannan talked about the woman in his district. Mr. Brannan, who is chairman of the finance committee and is running for city comptroller, asked about involuntary removals. A year and a half later, the woman was still in her same perch, a situation he called heartbreaking and inhumane. He argued for involuntary removal on compassionate grounds.

“How many times does an outreach worker have to engage with someone before it would inherently trigger an involuntary removal?” he wanted to know. “If we are visiting a client 20, 30, 40, 50 times, how long before you say, ‘This person clearly needs help’?” Ms. Park answered that sometimes it could take a hundred encounters to get people to come inside.

Was this sustainable? “I don’t know who this is for,” Mr. Brannan told me recently. “Who is benefiting from this exercise of going out there and saying: ‘Hey, do you need anything? No?’ OK. Check a box.” It certainly struck him as inefficient. “This is money that would probably be better spent toward supportive housing than going out there 70 times and offering someone a shower.”

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New York

How a Writer and Literary Agent Lives on $48,000 in Riverdale

Published

9 hours ago

May 11, 2026

Press Room

How a Writer and Literary Agent Lives on ,000 in Riverdale

How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.

We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?

Ask Lori Perkins what was the biggest bargain she ever scored and her life story comes pouring out. The Advanced Placement classes she took at a public high school, Bronx Science, helped her do four years of N.Y.U. in three. She bought her first apartment with money from a buyout she negotiated with a landlord. Got a break on her wedding from a hotel banquet director who was about to retire and a deal on her divorce for landing her lawyer a book contract.

“Every big thing in my life has been a bargain,” Ms. Perkins said last month as she stood in her apartment high above the Hudson River surrounded by the fruits of a lifetime of haggling.

The Herman Miller Noguchi glass coffee table? An invisibly chipped floor model for $700. To save the $700 delivery fee, she and a friend drove up to Westchester, wrapped it in a blanket and rolled it home “like Lucy and Ethel through the hallway.” The fox fur coat hanging over the chair? $20 new at a vintage shop. “When I looked it up, it was a $575 coat.”

The co-op apartment itself — three bedrooms on the 18th floor of a building on a hilltop in Riverdale in the Bronx — was a foreclosure special: $125,000 in 1992.

It is the apartment of someone who has lived — who is living — a full existence. A sign on the bright orange wall in the kitchen says “A clean house is the sign of a wasted life.” Shelves in every room groan beneath the weight of thousands of books.

Setbacks and Silver Linings

As a literary agent, Ms. Perkins, 66, has sold some 3,000 titles, including seven best-sellers — perhaps you’ve read Jenna Jameson’s memoir “How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.” She runs a publishing house, Riverdale Avenue Books, specializing in L.G.B.T.Q. erotica. She edited the zombie bodice-ripper anthology “Hungry for Your Love” and has written or co-written nine books herself, including a pair of paperbacks, “Two Dukes and a Lady” and “Two Dukes Are Better Than One,” that birthed a hybrid genre she calls “duke ménage.”

In the last few years, she’s endured some setbacks, but each one has had a silver lining. Burning through her 401(k) — over $100,000 — to pay for her late mother’s dementia care let Ms. Perkins qualify for Medicaid so that when she got breast cancer early in the pandemic all her expenses were covered. Her treatment at Mount Sinai led her to teach journaling to breast cancer survivors, which led to a grant from the Bronx Council on the Arts to teach at her local senior center, where she has discovered a whole community.

The aftereffects of cancer, coupled with a plunge in her publishing house’s overseas sales, which she attributes to Trump-fueled anti-American sentiment, forced her to downshift a couple of gears, take more time to enjoy things and embrace frugality as a lifestyle.

Here’s the state of her hustle, 2026: She’s getting $22,000 from Social Security, about $20,000 as an agent, a couple thousand for freelance writing and, hopefully, another couple for running writing workshops. She signs up for focus groups, “usually about being old,” and will squeeze about $1,000 out of that. And she has lined up a 10-day, $3,000 gig as a Board of Elections poll worker. All told, she’s looking at little under $50,000.

How to Afford the Day-to-Day

On the spending side, the monthly maintenance on her apartment is $2,000, though she’s looking to downsize and move to a lower floor, which she figures could cut her cost in half. “Somebody can call me and buy my apartment right now.” $750,000!

The maintenance includes use of the complex’s outdoor pool, but she rents a cabana with an umbrella for $500 a year “because I can’t go in the sun, after radiation,” she said.

Insurance on her aging Volkswagen Beetle is $1,900 a year. Her annual pilgrimage to Maine costs about $1,200. Most of the rest is day-to-day stuff. Groceries are maybe $200 a month. “I go to Stew Leonard’s where they have dollar beers,” she said.

She allots $250 a month for entertainment, including meals out. She gets the $10 lunch special to go at the local Chinese restaurant and heats it up for dinner. She never misses Restaurant Week.

She does $5 movie Tuesdays at the Showcase Cinema in Yonkers, $4.50 for Broadway tickets through Club Free Time, an online publication. She re-ups her Hulu and Disney+ subscriptions on Black Friday, when they’re $1.99 or $2.99 a month. She’s going to see Bruce Springsteen at Madison Square Garden on Saturday and the tickets were $130, “so that’s most of my budget for May, but it’s worth it.”

What about museums? Dollar admission at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cloisters for city residents, free Fridays at the Whitney, pay-what-you wish hours at the Guggenheim. “I used to be a member of all of them, and if I ever had more money I would go back to being a member, but right now I’m taking advantage of their generosity,” Ms. Perkins said.

Her wardrobe budget is minimalist like her fashion. “If it’s winter, I’m wearing black pants and a black shirt. And if it’s summer, I’m wearing a black dress.”

Even her splurges have been bargains. The cruise she took in Italy, using money she had saved by taking the toll-free Broadway Bridge instead of the Henry Hudson Bridge when she drove to Manhattan, was effectively free after she won $1,000 gambling on board.

The Middle Class Fantasy

“I really believe you can do almost anything if you research and plan,” Ms. Perkins said. “It’s the spontaneity that’s hard. And we as Americans are really spoiled.”

Looking back on her journey, Ms. Perkins has reached some conclusions that surprised her.

“Cancer saved my life,” she said. “The life that I was leading was exhausting because I was trying so hard to keep up with this fantasy of middle-classness.”

Now, she said, “I don’t care if I’m wearing last year’s shoes, I don’t need to go out every night to a Michelin-starred restaurant, because I go two times a year, and you know what, when you save up for it, it’s more joyful. Every single thing. Every little joy is a bigger joy. I can’t explain it. I took so much for granted when I had more money.”

Did she mention she’s working on another book?

“It’s called ‘La Vida Broka: How to Live Richly When You’re Dirt Poor,’” Ms. Perkins said. “Just buy the book, because it’s all going to be in there.”

We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.

New York

Maya Lin Connects Nature to a New Manhattan Skyscraper and Beyond

Published

21 hours ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

Maya Lin Connects Nature to a New Manhattan Skyscraper and Beyond

On a recent spring afternoon, the renowned artist and designer Maya Lin clambered up and down a rocky outcropping in Central Park in New York, undeterred by the crowd of tourists that was shooting photos nearby.

While they snapped selfies, she reflected on how this place — and similar geology near her childhood home in Athens, Ohio — had inspired her latest creation: the stone facade on the western walls of the 60-story JPMorgan Chase skyscraper in Midtown Manhattan. Estimated to have cost from $3 billion to $4 billion, and with glowing artwork at the summit visible citywide, it opened last fall and occupies the block between 47th and 48th Streets and Madison and Park Avenues.

Her project, “A Parallel Nature,” is a sculpture composed of two 59-foot-tall and 55-foot-wide gray stone walls set in an intricate design, with plants that peek out from the crevices. An array of flowers has been newly planted on the walls this spring.

Lin’s long career and passion for the environment made her a natural choice for the project.

Now 66, she began her career as a 21-year-old senior at Yale University when she won a competition to design the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which was dedicated in 1982 in Washington, D.C. Among her many recent projects is the water fountain installation titled “Seeing Through the Universe” for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago, set to open to the public next month.

Five of Lin’s works will also be on view at Pace Gallery’s booth at Frieze New York this week. There are pieces that call attention to bodies of water that are disappearing or that have already disappeared — Lake Chad in North Africa and the Aral Sea in Central Asia — along with a piece focused on the Antarctic Circle, and a new silver sculpture, “Silver Yellowstone,” that is inspired by the Yellowstone River, widely considered to be the longest free-flowing river in the lower 48 states.

In a recent series of interviews in her home office on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, at the JPMorgan Chase building and during the ramble through the rocky terrain near the lower eastern end of Central Park known as the “Dene,” a British term for a valley, Lin described the woods and rock cliffs she remembered from growing up in Ohio.

“Water would just subtly drip down the cliffs, and there would be ferns and grasses and things growing there,” she explained, adding, “I was definitely out there in nature almost daily, and very concerned about environmental issues.”

Central Park, which Lin explores regularly when she is in Manhattan, was its own inspiration. Her family also has a home in southwestern Colorado, where she hikes and bikes every summer.

In 2022, she and representatives of JPMorgan Chase and Tishman Speyer, the development manager of the new skyscraper, took a daylong walk through the park, looking for a rock formation that could serve as the model for “A Parallel Nature” and “bring a little bit of the character” of the park to the building, Lin said.

They initially failed to identify anything appropriate. Lin returned the next morning on her own and came across the Dene, which she had seen on previous walks through the park.

“When I first got a call to look at the building site, I realized that the subway would be running underneath it,” Lin explained. “And I saw an excavation photo of Grand Central Station that showed that its construction cut through Manhattan’s bedrock. And I just had an idea, ‘What if I could bring bedrock to the surface in the middle of Manhattan?’”

“What I am interested in is, quite literally, grounding you in what might be right below your feet that you might not be aware of,” she added.

Capturing the Dene on the exterior wall of the skyscraper, Lin explained, would enable her to express the character of an exposed stone outcropping in Manhattan, quite literally bringing bedrock to the surface, in a way that echoes the Dene in Central Park.

Lin identified a type of gray granite from Barre, Vt., for “A Parallel Nature” that she called a perfect match with the metamorphic rock known as gneissic schist on which the JPMorgan Chase skyscraper sits.

The 239 stone pieces mounted atop the artwork’s two walls were cut by the Quarra Stone Company, a Wisconsin-based stone fabricator that transported the stone on large, flatbed trucks from Vermont to Wisconsin and then to Manhattan. Lin called the installation of the walls on the facade of the skyscraper her most difficult commission yet.

“Trying to create something that would be a balance between natural and man-made was the aesthetic challenge,” she explained. “And to keep the artwork as a sculptural creation rather than an architectonic solution — also the engineering to fabricate and install — were intricate and extremely complex.”

The stonework on each wall is composed of over 100 pieces of granite, Lin said, “so by grouping 15 to 20 pieces together and ever so slightly tilting them, I was able to create larger groupings to help create what I call city states. These helped make each wall feel like it was comprised of larger plates.”

Each of the pieces is hung, in a puzzle-like formation, from a steel bracket system installed on a steel ladder frame system anchored to the concrete support wall on the lowest level of the building’s Madison Avenue facade.

At the foot of each wall is a streambed with waterworn rocks that came from near the headquarters of the Wisconsin fabricator, chosen to work well with the gray granite walls. Water gently flows in the beds, creating a burbling stream in the middle of Midtown traffic cacophony. Lin calls the stream “an unexpected natural moment in the busy city.”

There are also two sources of water on the walls themselves, meant to irrigate the plantings in the walls’ seams. One is a drip irrigation line installed behind what Lin calls “plant pockets,” holes 10 to 12 inches deep that range in length from 3 to 7 feet and that are designed to hold the artwork’s vegetation.

The second is a drip irrigation system that runs along the top of the rock walls. This gently drips continuous streams of water that find their way down and beneath the surface of the rock, nourishing the plantings in the crevices and ledges. The system is designed to encourage plant growth and to bring the sound of trickling water to the facade.

Lin is working with specialists on the plantings, including Blondie’s Treehouse, a Manhattan plant installer and supplier; Cecil Howell, a Brooklyn-based landscape architect who has worked with Lin on a number of recent environmental art installations; and Richard Hayden, the project’s consulting horticulturist, who is also the senior director of horticulture for the High Line, a public park built on a historic elevated rail line on Manhattan’s west side.

Though some plants were installed in late October, it was understood that since water would not be available until late fall, spring would be the ideal time for fresh planting.

Urban environments are tough on plants, Lin explained, calling the site’s horticulture “an experiment.” The horticulture team is trying more than 30 varieties of plants to see which ones thrive where, she said, adding that she expected the plants to be monitored and plantings adjusted quarterly.

Lin said she wanted “to create a predominantly native New York landscape reminiscent of what you might find naturally growing on rocks and within crevices in actual rock faces and ledges” to make visitors aware of the nature around them.

New plants growing this spring include maidenhair fern, Eastern red columbine, creeping phlox, Christmas fern and dwarf crested iris.

Just across from each of the artwork’s walls are a flower garden and native red maple trees, as well as long, sinuous concrete benches designed by Norman Foster, the skyscraper’s architect, all meant to create a sort of public park.

“A Parallel Nature,” as its name implies, “neither tries to perfectly recreate nature, nor feel architecturally fabricated,” Lin explained. “It is a work that makes ambiguous the line between the natural and the man-made.”

The sculpture is one of five works of public art commissioned for the new building by JPMorgan Chase — whose art collection was founded in 1959 by David Rockefeller, then executive vice president and vice chairman of Chase Manhattan Bank. The skyscraper’s other new works include that LED light work at the summit by Leo Villareal, whose art will also be on view at the Pace Gallery exhibit at Frieze; two paintings by Gerhard Richter in the building’s lobby; a 3-D printed, bronze column by Foster, also in the lobby; and a display of light and motion at the lobby’s elevator banks, driven by custom A.I. models by the Turkish artist Refik Anadol.

David Arena, head of global real estate for JPMorgan Chase, said the bank had deliberately lifted up both the Madison Avenue and Park Avenue bases of the new building 85 feet to create more outdoor space for pedestrians. “When passers-by step on the Madison Avenue curb,” he said, “they are awe-struck, think differently, have a moment of respite.”

“We thought it would be a great spot to make a gift to Manhattan and to people in the neighborhood who can come up, have a seat, enjoy a cup of coffee, enjoy some great art, maybe think differently,” he said.”

He also called Lin “one of the most accomplished modern-day artists, a strong enough talent to be a counterpoint to Norman Foster.”

Lin agrees with Arena’s predictions about the artwork. “Even though it can dialogue with the building in scale, it adds an unexpected, natural respite from the busy street life, offering a different feeling,” she said.

New York

‘She Studied Us for a Moment With Theatrical Longing’

Published

1 day ago

May 10, 2026

Press Room

‘She Studied Us for a Moment With Theatrical Longing’

Under Cover

Dear Diary:

On a false-spring afternoon, my boyfriend, Luis, and I went to the wine bar around the corner from my Williamsburg apartment. We were sitting at the bar having a private conversation when I asked Luis for the time.

“It’s 7:30,” a blonde woman beside us said before he could answer.

She turned toward us with the bright, urgent expression of someone who had already decided we were all having a drink together. She was drunk, her mascara intact, but only just.

“What do you guys do?” she asked.

I told her I was a first-year teacher in Queens. Luis said he would be graduating in the spring and was looking for a job in marketing.

She studied us for a moment with theatrical longing, and then she leaned in so far that her shoulder nearly touched mine.

“I have a secret,” she said, beaming. “You can’t tell anyone.”

We promised.

She glanced toward the open windows, then back at us.

“I have my second interview with the C.I.A. tomorrow,” she whispered.

Luis and I looked at each other.

“If anyone asks,” she added, “tell them I’m interviewing with the Culinary Institute of America.”

A few minutes later, we paid our check, wished her luck and promised not to tell a soul.

— David Reyes-Mastroianni

Moon Over Manhattan

Dear Diary:

I was walking out of Central Park on a cold February evening when a woman who couldn’t have been five feet tall approached me.

“Have you seen the moon?” she asked.

I tried to brush her off, but she repeated herself.

I turned to see the most brilliant full moon shining above the park. It stopped me in my tracks on a day when I had been in constant motion.

I turned to thank the woman, but she was gone. It was as if the moon herself had come down to demand attention and had left as soon as attention was paid.

— Rebecca Falcon

Wrapped Up

Dear Diary:

Late one night after I moved to Manhattan from the rural South in 1989, I was riding the No. 6 train home from my job at Mortimer’s when I sat down across from what appeared to be a man completely wrapped in a sheet and lying across several seats.

He was wrapped so tightly that there seemed to be no way he could have done it himself.

I couldn’t discern any movement. Not a breath. Not a sound. Did he need help? Was he dead? Was this performance art? What should I do?

No one else seemed to be paying any attention, but my agitation must have been visible, because finally, an impeccably dressed older woman wearing white gloves and a hat with a lace veil leaned toward me.

“I don’t think he wants to be disturbed,” she said.

— Brian McMaster

Pretty Peaches

Dear Diary:

I was walking down 79th Street when I heard a woman with a large, coral-colored cockatoo on her shoulder say: “Excuse me. Can you hold my bird?”

I looked around. Was she talking to me?

She huffed at my two seconds of confusion.

“Just put your arm out!” she said.

I did, and while this woman answered her phone, her imposing bird with claws as big as my hands hopped onto my wrist, then sidled up my arm and onto my shoulder.

She was heavier than I expected. Not quite like having a dog on my shoulder, but maybe a cat.

I wanted to look at her. It’s not every day you have a large bird sitting on you, but I was afraid that if I did, she might gouge out my eyeballs with her imposing beak.

I decided to fix my eyes on a nearby street sign and hope for the best. The bird told me her name was Peaches, that she was 7 years old and also that she was pretty.

My first thought was: Well, aren’t we a little full of ourselves? But then I caught myself. Good for you, Peaches, I thought. I wish I had your confidence.

I told Peaches I had an appointment and hoped her owner would get off the phone soon.

Then Peaches gripped my shoulder a little tighter with her claws and stretched the top of her body up and over my head so that I was wearing her like a pair of earmuffs.

“I love you,” she said.

We stayed in this magical bird hug for a minute or two before her owner whisked her off my shoulder with a halfhearted “Thanks” and hurried away.

Peaches turned her head 180 degrees, seemed to look at me longingly and disappeared into the day.

— Eileen Kelly