Mayor Eric Adams launching initiative to curb homelessness as part of State of the City

NEW YORK CITY (WABC) -- Mayor Eric Adams held his State of The City address on Thursday, and at the centerpiece was an action plan to curb homelessness and support people with mental illness.

The announcement comes after a series of horrifying attacks, including a woman torched and killed on the subway in Coney Island and three others stabbed to death at random in Manhattan.

"All of those things, I think, contributes to our own mental health of not feeling, you know, being anxious all the time," said NYC Health and Human Services Deputy Mayor Anne Williams-Isom.

Williams-Ison is responsible for the city's strategy in dealing with the homeless and severely mentally ill, and she was there on Thursday as Adams announced a groundbreaking $650 million investment that includes a facility dedicated to stabilizing those with severe mental illness.

"We can't just walk past them and act like they can take care of themselves when they can't," Adams said. "We know that too many New Yorkers cycled between the hospital and homelessness, so we're going to build a new housing facility just for unsheltered New Yorkers with serious mental illness. To give them their help and care is specialized support that they need."



The new facility would be an attempt to break the cycle where unstable people are taken to psychiatric emergency rooms, stabilized and then released in a few days.

"I looked at the homeless outreach and I said, 'We have to deepen it,'" Williams-Ison said. "I said, 'What's working and what's not? Let's stop doing some of the stuff that's not working. Let's do more of the stuff that's working.'"

New York City continued to experience a significant influx of asylum seekers in 2024. Those migrants who were in emergency shelters also accounted for almost 88% of the increase in sheltered homelessness in the city.

A new federal report also stated that New York saw a 53% increase overall in homelessness between 2023 and 2024.

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