It's bad enough that a huge eyesore of a homeless enclave is allowed to fester near New York City's landmark Intrepid Museum, along with all the problems those encampments cause. Now it's gotten worse; the "residents" of that enclave were caught brazenly stealing electricity from the city grid. Fortunately, even in Zohran Mamdani's New York, that was a bridge too far, and the New York Police Department stepped in and put a stop to it.
A shameless vagrant at the putrid homeless encampment that has sprouted up along a wide stretch of Manhattan’s West Side tapped into city utility lines for electricity on Tuesday, as the unsightly shantytown continues to flaunt City Hall.
The brazen utility theft at a makeshift red shelter at 34th Street between 11th and 12th Avenue, part of a 12-block-long encampment near the Intrepid Museum, is the latest slap in the face to Big Apple tourists and neighborhood workers and residents.
This happens, of course, because the city allows it to happen, and it's getting worse, causing an economic toll to the people who work in the area.
“Almost one month now – getting a little bigger every time I come back,” one Flixbus driver told The Post. “They put the garbage here on the sidewalk so the people have to wait in the street when I come with the bus.
“They’re asking the people waiting for the bus for money,” the driver said. “It’s no good. My boss called and complained and they do nothing.”
If you could sum up this entire problem with one sentence, it would be: "(We) complained and they do nothing." This is a problem that goes well beyond New York; it extends into pretty much every major city in the country.
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The city did at least crack down on the illegal electrical hookup - for now.
On Tuesday, two patrol cops ordered the utility-stealing vagrant to unplug it, while three other police officers were spotted confiscating surge protectors and extension cords from another shelter at 36th Street and Hudson Boulevard.
Neither move is expected to have a lasting effect.
Of course, it won't have any lasting effect. The effect will only last until the cops walk away. Then, the vagrants will wire it right back up again. Now, in this vagrant enclave, we can add the increased risk of fire to the ever-present risks of disease resulting from a lack of sanitation, of crime, and open-air drug use. It's only a matter of time before an electrical fire starts in this encampment.
New York may well be the archetype, but this is a major problem for every city in the U.S., from New York to Los Angeles, from Minneapolis to San Antonio. Even in the Great Land, the city locals are starting to call 'Los Angeles' has these encampments, which adds the risk of sub-zero temperatures to the fact that these trash-strewn enclaves are a major draw for bears.
These things happen because the city governments allow them to happen. Until the laws on street camping, vagrancy, and, for the luvva Pete, elementary sanitation are enforced, this problem will never go away.
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