If you want to know how Donald J. Trump could once again become President Trump, look at the images that New York is broadcasting to the country about how an all-Democratic city — with a Democratic mayor, governor and president — governs itself.
New York has turned Midtown into an ungoverned homeless migrant camp.
Mayor Eric Adams shoulders most of the blame for this all-too-foreseeable development, but Gov. Kathy Hochul and President Joe Biden are also proving themselves feckless to handle a slow-motion crisis.
The original sin came in May, when Adams unilaterally determined that he would re-open the 1,025-room Roosevelt Hotel, closed during the pandemic, as a “welcome center” for migrants.
Converting a prime Midtown property — nestled between Grand Central Terminal and JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters, and fronting Madison Avenue — into a magnet for thousands of unassimilated newcomers was always a bad idea.
With only 60% of office workers back at their desks, a migrant center in Midtown crowds out the tourists and business travelers we need to support Manhattan’s recovery.
But once Adams determined to turn a well-loved tourist property into a social-services hub, he should have made sure to execute this venture competently.
He owns this one.
The mayor could’ve made sure to uphold certain standards of behavior: If people are new to a place, they don’t know what’s allowed and not allowed, unless someone tells them.
Instead, Adams allowed the north side of the Roosevelt, across from JPMorgan, to become a 24-hour repair, dispatch and storage spot for a tangle of haphazardly parked motorcycles, mopeds, e-bikes and stolen Citibikes and dozens of men congregating at any given time.
Last week, the city entirely lost control of the Roosevelt.
The point of a welcome center is orderly processing of people into overnight shelter.
If the city can’t do that, despite the billions of dollars it’s spending on contracts, it should not have opened a welcome center.
Starting last Wednesday, it became clear that the city is unable to perform this basic task.
A line of migrants began forming outside the hotel, with a contract worker telling people to wait.
One young woman at the beginning of the line told me she’d been there an hour; six hours later, she was still there, sweltering in 95-degree heat.
By the weekend, people had bedded down.
As of late Tuesday, most women had disappeared, leaving dozens of men to line the sidewalk on two sides of the hotel, sitting or lying on cardboard boxes under sun-shielding umbrellas.
Adams finally dispatched a handful of police officers.
But the city has done nothing — and given no indication of what it might do — to clear the two obstructed sidewalks of a permanent encampment.
People seeking shelter have been quickly joined by the city’s professional protest-and-agitate class, with the Revolutionary Communist Party unfurling a banner calling for “a fundamentally different system.”
We do need a fundamental rethink.
Adams doesn’t need to tell us he’s lost control of the migrant crisis: We can see that for ourselves.
This isn’t a question of federal money, as Adams has said over the past year.
It’s a question of physical space. Does New York want to fill all its hotel rooms with migrants, or does it want a tourism and business-travel industry?
Yet the mayor has still not yet said: New York has no more migrant beds, period.
He’s still all over the place, announcing more welcome centers even as he warns adults that their shelter will expire after 60 days.
With Adams having lost control, where is Hochul?
She, too, has only added to the fiction, last week agreeing to convert a Queens parking lot into a shelter.
The governor should say unequivocally: New York City’s right to shelter was not designed for, and can’t handle, an open-ended influx of migrants who have no prospects of exiting a shelter for years.
What is Biden’s immigration and asylum plan?
What’s the White House plan to ensure that people released into the United States return to court?
What’s the plan to clear a years-long backlog of asylum cases — and what’s the plan for the majority of applicants, who likely won’t qualify for asylum?
Come to the Roosevelt Hotel and see: Disorder and dysfunction are the plan.
And the city’s contract at the Roosevelt doesn’t expire until 2026.
Nicole Gelinas is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal.