The Ninth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, the greatest city in the world, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If you’re new, or confused, you’re in good company as I am, in the cosmic sense, also new, and in the general sense, deeply confused. If you’d like to listen from the first episode of this podcast, that’s what I recommend, as well as not listening to the mayor’s podcast at all, it’s bad, but either way, do what feels right for you. Today, I’m talking about the 9th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the get stuff done cast, titled NYC’s Homeless Outreach Workers: Changing Lives on our Streets and Subways, released May 25th, 2023, and abandoning the naming convention of S1 E(number) at the front (I assume for season 1, episode number).

As a heads up, this episode is just getting a blanket trigger warning for violence to the homeless and the mentally ill. I mean, I’m giving you that, the mayor never warns anyone about stuff like that. He’s great, why wouldn’t you be great when listening to him, right?

Well, I’m not always great, I assume you may not be, please take care of yourself, and if that means not listening to this episode, I completely understand that.

The intro to this episode is extremely scattered, even by the mayor’s somewhat free associative standards of communication. It’s not clear when he’s talking to us, when he’s setting the stage for what the conversation will be, and when he starts speaking with the people he’s interviewing. There’s a cut in of several clips of speech, clearly not given by the mayor, but whomever is speaking isn’t credited. Production notes aside, the episode is clearly about homeless services the city of New York provides. Adams also mentions the pandemic, in the sense that we’re post pandemic, so I’ll inform like half the people I know that they didn’t get COVID a couple weeks ago.

Adams, finally finding some sort of way into the episode, says that his administration’s focus has been on those who cannot not take care of their own basic needs, who are a danger to themselves and others. And then he brings up the death of Jordan Neely, which he evidently is pinning on mental health issues Neely had, and not on the man who murdered him, allegedly. Or, perhaps on the mental health issues of the man who murdered him, who everyone seems to just be deciding was acting in a sane manner when he murdered a man for no reason. Allegedly.

Anyway, we need to help the homeless so that there aren’t more Jordan Neelys says Eric Adams, and while I think everyone should have housing, I don’t think Jordan Neely’s mental health issues should be seen as the reason he died. He died because of Daniel Penny, who placed him in a chokehold. And if there were fears driving Penny, it’s worth asking what the source of those fears were. He might well have felt fear because he’d heard a great deal about how crime in NYC is out of control, and the people talking about out of control crime often do so by equating crime with the visible homeless. And often the person saying that crime is out of control, and illustrating this by pointing to the visible homeless is the mayor of New York, Eric Adams.

Adams says that he’s very sad about Jordan Neely and that his son’s name is Jordan, so he gets it, and wow I can’t believe I just said what I said I apologize to the Mayor, boy did I have it wrong.

Adams introduces his guests, Molly Park, the Commissioner of the Department of Social Services. (He introduces her as Molly Park, every bit of info I can find on her, including the show notes, refers to her as Molly Wasow Park, for the record). Xavier Shakesphere, is the other person introduced here (the mayor notes that Xavier must have been made fun of quite a bit for that name, and is really just out here being weird about peoples names on this episode). Xavier is an outreach worker with the city.

Molly starts by talking about how the housing and homelessness sectors of government are siloed, and her goal is to break that down. Homelessness, she says, is a housing issue. You’ll get no argument from me. The mayor notes that if you’re dealing with a severe mental illness, it’s difficult to keep a home, and that’s… I mean money is probably the main thing deciding whether you have a thing you pay money for. You may have difficulty getting money if you have mental illness, but some forms of mental illness are frankly rewarded with a great deal of money, like being a psychotic power seeker who can’t see other humans with empathy. And some folks have enough money that they can suffer all kinds of public displays of mental illness - here I’m thinking of people like Ye - and never be threatened with not having a home. Perfectly sane people go through the types of unlucky and unfortunate events that lead one to experience the stresses that come with being unable to afford a basic need like shelter, and that can lead one down certain mental paths. I’ve experienced stress induced depressive episodes, and I’ve never really wanted for resources. The brain’s like any other organ, it can be sickened by things that enter it, rather than things inherently wrong with the organ’s body. Not that it should matter either way as a determining factor on whether you can have a structure to prevent your body from being cold.

The mayor turns to Xavier and asks about their work doing outreach on the subway. Xavier has a degree in social work, worked in shelters around the city, and decided they wanted to address the reasons why people are where they are. Well, asks the mayor, why are they there?

A lot of reasons. For some, it’s a matter of mental illness. For many a matter of trust. A lack of family support. And housing costs.

I don’t disagree with any of that, and I certainly don’t mean to sound like I’m in conflict with a person who has done so much more work - good, vital, heroic work - with people than I ever will, but approaching this from the standpoint of “what these individuals express” sorta turns the problem around. People don’t have houses, that’s why they’re houseless. People have to pay for houses with money, so it’s all basically the same issue from my perspective: people don’t have money. These people don’t have money so they can’t get shelter, so the issue is they need to be given one or the other in some fashion. We recoil from this because we’ve internalized that we’ve earned our money and therefore the stuff that we buy with it, and in the literal sense, it’s absolutely the case. I make money in one of the most transactional ways possible, I walk dogs and people pay me for it, every step I take is one toward more oat milk in my fridge. The temptation is to view it as unfair that I do that to get oat milk and someone else is simply given cash or a house is very strong, and can quickly toxify into the belief that, because I do what I do to get oat milk, they must not have oat milk because they didn’t do that, despite me having no way to know the individual circumstances that bought a person to their unfortunate circumstances. And honestly, would it matter? If someone screwed up or even was lazy and just wanted to be given a home, that person wouldn’t be taking my money or devaluing the work I do by simply by receiving an extremely basic necessity. I think this is what the tax the rich movement gets wrong, though I do feel like we should tax wealth more aggressively than we do, just as an issue of where the money is. It assumes the stance that taxpayer money is being taken from them and that this is a loss. It’s not! Taxes pay for things like cleaning the water and keeping unfortunate people from dying in the streets and these are gains for society and me personally!

To make a digression a little less digressive, let’s talk about mental health, because I also think that discussion misses the whole fucking point. A rich person can be mentally ill. Elon Musk can post the most paranoid shit to Twitter that he wants, no one talks about how his lack of trust in the systems and resources the government provides are somehow misguided, or costing him, like, food. You don’t need family help if you’re rich, and housing costs are less of a thing, of course, if you’re wealthy.

I mean, in terms of trust, this entire podcast I’m doing is about how I basically don’t trust this weird man who is running the city, and I have a pretty nice apartment. I’ve experienced mental illness. I have wonderful friends and family in my life, who’ve helped me financially, but if they hadn’t been there it’s really impossible for me to weigh how things would be different for me, because my family’s financial help was predicated on the fact that they could financially help. In other words, I was born to upper middle class people, I am upper middle class now. That’s how this all goes. The homeless are rarely born upper middle class. I’m sure it happens, but the issue is just that things like housing are really expensive and many people who don’t have a lot of money can’t pay for it. Or, as Xavier notes: housing costs.

How do you build trust, asks the mayor.

Xavier says that sometimes it can take hundreds of interactions, and typically starts these interactions with the homeless on the subways by acting like they already know each other and asking if there’s something they can offer. They talk about the options.

Then they cut in a speech from the mayor where he talks about the tragedy of mental illness and how it often prevents the sufferer from knowing they need help.

This… look there are mental illnesses that cause true detachment from reality, either temporarily or long term.

But so much of this seems to be about recasting the difficulty people have with affording housing - in July the median rent in Manhattan was 4,400, the average rent was 5,600, both all time highs - as less an issue of how much fucking money it costs to have a home, and more an issue with the individuals who cannot find that money, as if mental illness is created in people and then those people become homeless, and there’s no other issues in play.

Adams asks the Commissioner for the three reasons people end up homeless, as if he didn’t ask Xavier that question. He also tells a little story about meeting one of “my former police officers” who’s homeless now. They spoke briefly, initially the mayor didn’t recognize him, but then he did. He wanted to ask, but didn’t, what happened to the man.

I don’t know if the mayor knows how this story portrays him.

Underlying all of the reasons, says Molly, is the cost of housing and income inequality. Thank you, Molly, I know you’re trying.

She adds that half a million households in NYC make less than 30k a year and pay more than 50% of their earnings in rent. You can imagine how many people are in a half a million households, it’s way more than half a million people.

So that is why, the mayor says, it’s important that we settled a union contract with DC37 that paid them a good wage. DC37, if you don’t know (I also didn’t know and had to google it) is the city’s largest municipal public employee union, with 150,000 members and about 90,000 retirees, and I don’t know how many of them overlap with the commissioner’s figures in those extremely precarious half a million households, but just doing some math, I don’t think that their contract was really the issue causing a spiking rise in homelessness in this city over the last decade or so.

Anyway, add in issues like a health crisis, not necessarily a mental one, the commissioner is careful to note, or domestic violence. Adams notes that they have shelters for victims of domestic violence.

And, the commissioner notes, for the third thing, uh, what Xavier said, which is lack of family support.

Wow, says the mayor. That’s why we need community.

Ok, sure, how are we getting community? But also, the words “the rent is too damn high” have been all but screamed at the mayor repeatedly throughout this podcast and he’s just not… just not-ing.

The mayor says he remembers talking with a guy on the subway who was very intelligent who had no shoes. And now he has a picture in his office of the two of them chatting.

It was here, when Adams was talking about a creep-shot he put up in his office of a shoeless person experiencing their lowest point, that I got a little tired and started to despair a bit. This episode is more or less two very politically adroit members of Adams’ administration telling him what he wants to hear about how bravely and competently his administration is dealing with the issue of homelessness while every so often including the information that he refuses to hear, that homelessness is caused by skyrocketing rents. There are no mentions of new initiatives or efforts by the administration to address this issue holistically. There’s no signature, named, Thing they’re doing, a la his stupid dinner series or de Blasio’s Vision Zero or Universal Pre-K. Just them telling him what needs to change, and him responding with platitudes about everyone pitching in.

This city has real problems. Homelessness is one of them. Our schools are a mix of very nice and nightmares. Climate change is about to smash into us and 4 of the 5 boroughs of the city are on islands. When faced with just one of those problems, one that has a very obvious solution: provide actual housing, by building actual housing, the mayor resorts to pablum. Nothing changes except that, if for no other reason than entropy alone, it gets worse.

I believe that the people who work in homeless outreach are doing truly wonderful work, and I think they should be given every resource and also the people who run our cities are fucking ruining them and making them unlivable and the most obvious sign of that is that there are so many people who are unable to live in them with things like shoes and apartments.

It is disgusting to me that the chief executive of the city would pat himself on the back for feeding the homeless at a food distribution, or talking to a homeless man on the subway, when he is responsible for the conditions that put those people in the place they are.

But it’s never his fault. Nothing is. After all, as he keeps mentioning, god told him he’d be mayor. Did god tell him he’d be a good one?

What was the mayor up to in the time between the recording of the previous episode, May 10th and this one on May 25th? To do this I lean heavily on the reporting of two fantastic New York City outlets, The City, and Hell Gate, both of which I support financially, and I encourage you to do so as well. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

Well, funny that he was talking about the houseless and homeless in such self-fellating terms since this was when he signed an executive order attempting to limit NYC’s right to shelter law.

Speaking of de Blasio’s Universal Pre-K, Adams, whose administration owes UPK providers about 400 million dollars for services already rendered, proposed cuts to the program of 570 million dollars over just two years, which would more or less kill the most successful universal good that any mayor of this stupid city has accomplished since the smoking ban in restaurants, 20 years ago.

Adams was a speaker at the graduation of CUNY’s Law School, whose students booed and turned their backs on him. This was in large part because of his habit of being on the wrong side of history in just about every case, including his extremely recent statements on Jordan Neely’s death and his refusal to condemn the actions of Daniel Penny, the man who allegedly murdered Neely. CUNY students are a pretty progressive bunch, but also Adams had recently proposed massive cuts to the budget of the City University system so honestly what the hell were school administrators thinking would happen?

And Hell Gate, again,I cannot recommend strongly enough, reported that since Adams took his first paycheck in crypto because that’s normal, bitcoin had lost 25% of its value.

If you liked this, or thought it was interesting and want to hear more, the best way to make sure you do so is to hit subscribe on whatever podcatcher app you’re using to hear my voice right now. The best way to let other people know about this podcast is to tell a friend or enemy about it, but I refuse to believe that liking it does anything, and reviewing it will just take up moments of your life that you could be telling a friend or, I don’t know, watching videos to try and figure out why your cactus is browning.

Transcripts of this show are available at:

https://stuffstuffcastcast.wixsite.com/stufftranscripts

I’d love to hear from you. You can email me at:

stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.