During a televised speech, New York City Mayor Eric Adams was heckled over the Big Apple's homelessness problem as the crisis intensifies citywide. Joking off the jeers, the Democrat's bizarre response made everyone uncomfortable, to say the least.
"F*ck Eric Adams! F*ck you, a**hole!" a woman shouted at the progressive mayor on the streets of NYC with Department of Buildings (DOB) Commissioner Jimmy Oddo to unveil a plan to remove construction scaffolding from sidewalks.
"She said I'm messing with homeless people," a laughing Adams reacted in response to the off-camera heckler. That's when Adams, awkwardly shifting at the podium, said, "One should be happy if someone wants to make love to them. You know?"
The sex joke didn't land with the audience—left silent as Adams was the only one chuckling at his own remark.
In recent years, homelessness in NYC has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression, according to the Coalition for the Homeless, which provides up-to-date data on the city's homeless population. As of May 2023, almost 83,650 people are sleeping in NYC's main municipal-shelter system, the coalition's statistics found, with 26,775 homeless children sleeping in Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) shelters each night.
The number of homeless New Yorkers sleeping nightly in municipal shelters is now 39 percent higher than ten years ago. In comparison, the coalition calculated that the number of homeless single adults is 112 percent higher than a decade ago.
When Adams took office, there were 45,000 New Yorkers in the city's primary sheltering system, the New York Times reported. About 1 in 80 city residents do not have a permanent place to live. However, it's still reportedly not an accurate census.
On the last night of May, nearly 90,000 people slept across five city-administered shelter systems, according to an inaugural first-of-its-kind report released by the Adams administration's mayoral Office of Operations, offering a more comprehensive picture than the daily DHS count oft-cited by journalists and policymakers. "The report is a devastating index of human misery and suffering more than it is anything else," MFJ Legal Services social worker Craig Hughes told local investigative outlet City Limits.
Maybe the poem on the Statue of Liberty should be exchanged for a sign reading "Welcome to the Greatest Homeless Shelter on Earth". https://t.co/PY7mGsuRkD pic.twitter.com/LY6q4tx70a
— Crime in NYC (@CrimeInNYC) July 24, 2023
Last month, the Democrat-led city hit a record 100,000 homeless people in its shelters, partly due to the influx of illegal immigrants from America's embattled border with Mexico entering New York City's sheltering complex. In the fallout of Title 42's end, illegal aliens accounted for more than half of the homeless receiving care and shelter through the city's social safety net.
The continuing crisis has certainly tested the lengths Adams is willing to go to maintain New York's status as a sanctuary city.
Mayor Eric Adams is “now in court, today, asking a judge to revisit” NYC’s sanctuary city law:
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 15, 2023
“No one thought that they would be dealing with a humanitarian crisis of this proportion.” pic.twitter.com/UxkkYzhc0n
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