The Second Episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

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

The mayor of New York, Eric Adams has a podcast. No one listens to it except a dog walker in Queens. If you’d like more info about all of that, I suggest listening to the first episode of this podcast.

This episode, our third, is about the second episode of the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E02 - Asylum Seekers: How NYC Manages a Historic Humanitarian Crisis which was released Feb 6th, 2023. It features Eric Adams having a sit-down conversation with Manuel Castro, Commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Immigration Affairs, Zachary Iscol, Commissioner of NYC emergency management, and Dr. Ted Long, Senior VP for Ambulatory care and Population Health at NYC Health and Hospitals. Man that’s a lot of long formal titles.

Out of the gate, one of the things I’m going to raise is that there aren’t transcripts for this podcast - or at least I couldn’t find them - which not only limits the people who can engage with this show to people who can listen to a podcast (as well as people for whom this medium is useful) but also makes my job extremely annoying. Still, this is the life I’ve chosen, but I do wonder if the ADA might have something to say about a government project that doesn’t take reasonable steps to make sure of accessibility.

Adams begins by setting the stage. A lot of people are coming to New York and he needs people who can manage the crisis - his word for a lot of people coming to New York - while assuring that basic services continue unimpeded.

He introduces Zach Iscol, who has one of the long titles I gave a few moments ago, but Adams focuses primarily on Iscol’s time in the Marines. Dr. Ted Long is introduced as a guy who smiles a lot and who ran test and trace during COVID. Manuel Castro is introduced as a guy who has been through a lot personally.

Adams continues to set the stage by saying that a whopping 43,000 people went through the shelter system last year, which sounds like… not a lot in the largest city in the country?

Adams asks Manuel Castro to humanize the refugee experience by talking about his own family’s arrival in America when he was 5. So Castro does that. It’s broad strokes, Castro seems like he may be uncomfortable talking about his family, which would be understandable, but it’s compelling. Castro seems empathetic and like he really cares for the people arriving here, and wants to give them a less hardship filled experience than his family had. He gives the first talking point of the episode: This is historic and in the same way we read about Ellis Island, we’re going to read about this. Wikipedia tells me that in its first year of operation Ellis Island processed 400,000 immigrants.

At any rate, the mayor says that Castro is correct.

He then asks Isocl to talk about the places they identified to house these migrant refugees. How did they pick these places where they’ve put 4 HERRCs (Housing Emergency Response and Relief Centers) which are basically temporary tent based refugee camps, and 80-some hotels in the city. Iscol responds that they went and looked at places and used an inter-agency process. They’ve looked at cruise ships, parks and parking lots for housing people and none of those are uh houses?

He says that there’s issues with every place they look at so they need to figure those issues out. His team has looked at 120 locations across the city which if you’re paying attention doesn’t appear to be that much higher than the 84ish that the mayor cited as being open. A 2/3s hit ratio, they must be doing really good at finding places with issues they can mitigate, despite looking at parking lots and parks as if those are realistic housing options. When asked how long it takes to open a site, Iscol says there’s months of negotiations with people in control of the property, but once they’re allowed to open, 7-10 days, which OK, they’re moving fast in what they claim is a crisis, but that doesn’t imply that a lot of stuff is going to be available at these sites. Indeed if you look at photos of the Randall’s Island HERRC it’s a big tented room full of cots. That’s about it.

I don’t want to diminish the work that people are doing here, it’s very difficult and the ones who truly want to help are doing saint level work, but none of this seems oriented towards actually housing people, actually making New Yorkers of these people. Partially I'm coming to this with the benefit of another 9 or so months of the Mayor ranting at every live mic he could find that NYC didn’t have the resources to manage this crisis that keeps threatening to overwhelm the city (but somehow never actually does so) and then recently literally traveling to the Darién Gap to tell migrants to their faces not to come here.

Everyone on this podcast calls Eric Adams “Mr. Mayor” or “Sir.”

Iscol keeps saying that they’re doing their best, that no location could ever be perfect, and I keep being a little mystified because of course doing large congregate services in tents on disused land, or buying out flophouse hotels is going to come with quote unquote challenges for the people housed there: that’s why there isn’t housing there. Maybe you could put people you’re trying to house in, like, actual housing?

Adams says to Iscol “As a Marine, you know better than anyone. When you’re in the field of battle, you have to compromise.”

You know, I’ve only met a couple Marines, but compromising isn’t how I’d describe them.

Iscol says there aren’t a lot of hotels remaining that the city can use this way, because of the rates hotel owners want to charge, which doesn’t seem like the type of thing a city as wealthy as New York should just be admitting? Like, one you have the money, you just don’t want to spend it, two, you are the city the hotels are in, you can tell them what you’re going to be paying them and let them lump it, and three there’s just an assumption so basic underlying all of this: this must be done cheaply and without basic comforts for these people. We can’t possibly get them good hotels at rates that tourists are charged. These aren’t tourists. They’re… less than those people. They get “shelter”. Unless they’re single adult males, Iscol hurries to add. Families get shelter. Single adult males can go into congregate settings, like the HERRCs. I cannot imagine there’s a way to prevent COVID from spreading in that environment, but then, it’s not like these are real people. I’m getting angry, but I’m listening to people congratulating themselves for providing a warehouse full of cots to the immiserated.

Ted talks about the stuff we provide as a city. Laundry, languages, food, tickets to elsewhere. Ahem.

We started by providing one sandwich per day, and dinner. Then we found out not everyone wants a sandwich. We asked people what they wanted to eat.

Everyone then agrees that it’s hurtful that people call the HERRCs detention camps.

This opens the main thrust of the podcast. While the asylum seekers need support, and have been through terrible traumas, the real victims are those being called mean names for not giving them that support. A lot of time gets spent on the fact that people protested the forced removal of settled refugees from a hotel to a HERRC, which sure seemed to be based on the fact that local residents near the hotel were upset that refugees had the temerity to exist near them. To hear Adams tell it, the villains in this story are obviously the people who were upset that the refugees were being moved.

Iscol is asked to talk about places they turned down. Sometimes there’s asbestos issues. There’s a huge warehouse in Brooklyn that’d be perfect, but it’s full of rats and it would cost 3 million dollars to remediate that so if you want to write a horror movie in your head for a quick moment: evidently there’s this huge CITY STORAGE BUILDING IN BROOKLYN JUST SITTING THERE FULL OF RATS WHO ARE BUSY GENERATING MORE RATS ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THE GREATEST CITY IN THE WORLD DOESN’T HAVE 3 MILLION DOLLARS.

They looked at armories, but they’d have to displace community programming. Parks need tent-supporting infrastructure. Randall’s island had concerts scheduled and obviously people need concerts more than refugees need roofs. The cruise terminal had to stay open to ships, because otherwise how would people catch norovirus, which people need more than refugee children need vaccines. NONE OF THESE THINGS ARE HOUSING MAYBE BUILD ACTUAL HOUSING WE NEED HOUSING ANYWAY IN THIS CITY. These idiots keep talking about their imaginations and pivoting and shifting and improvising and then their solutions to about 40000 people is uh how bout we put up a big tent on a flooded abandoned rail-yard, and my guy, you’re allowed to go with the second thought. Even if the second thought is like really really obviously the actual solution.

“There’s a commercial that says never let them see you sweat,” says a man who just soaked his seat complaining that no one gave him a Nobel peace prize for figuring out that the roast beef sandwiches are so bad people who walked through the fucking Darién Gap with their families on their back were refusing to eat them. And then he shuts the pod down for this episode.

What have we learned. Well, Eric Adams does speak compassionately about these people, while also speaking about them… abstractly, and frankly with a dehumanizing remove. He never says a single specific thing about an asylum seeker that he met except how they kept telling him what a good job he was doing.

Members of Adams’ administration don’t seem empowered to speak very freely, they only answer his questions, mostly by repeating back statements that he phrased as a question. Eric Adams doesn’t like hearing no. Eric Adams has thin skin and takes criticism very personally. Eric Adams seems to spend a lot of time in this podcast complaining about how mean everyone is to him, that’s time that he could be focusing on communicating about the work they’re doing and their plans moving forward. New Yorkers are mean to the powerful. That’s like one of the best things about this fucking city.

Because we’re looking back, I am going to give you a quick update on what the mayor was doing between the release of the previous episode on January 30th 2023 and this one on February 6th, so we can put it in context.

He slept overnight in a migrant shelter in Brooklyn, and put multiple pictures and videos of himself hanging out with migrants who were I’m sure happy to be photographed for that purpose. For his part, the mayor said he slept like a baby.

He started the curbside compost pickup, to divert food scraps from landfills, and I really have nothing at all negative to say about that, it’s legitimately a good thing. Good job, mayor.

He ended the COVID vaccine mandate for city employees.

And he had the city’s office of the mayor website put up a press release about his podcast, and this stuck out to me:

“We vowed to build an administration that talks directly to — and hears directly from — the people we serve, and that’s exactly what the new ‘Get Stuff Done-Cast' will help us do,” said Mayor Adams. “Sign up to hear directly from me and from New Yorkers from all walks of life on how we’re actually ‘Getting Stuff Done’ for our city.”

As a spoiler, I’ve already listened to quite a few of these and at no time has the mayor indicated that there’s a way for him to hear directly from the people listening. He never mentions an email address where you can send him feedback or questions, or asks what you’d like to hear about. He never solicits reviews or ratings (though, to be fair, I will also never do so because I do not believe that reviewing something like a podcast is a sane thing to do, but I will give you my email in like 30 seconds).

So that’s this episode in the mayor, and that’s this episode as a whole.

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, eating something delicious.

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.