The God-Awful Homeless Deaths in Mamdani’s New York City

National Review Online

Tuesday, February 03, 2026

 

‘This new age will be one of relentless improvement,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised last November as voters handed him the keys to the city. But that was before the temperatures truly dropped.

 

In his inaugural address, the incoming mayor said, in one particularly tortured passage, “For too long, those fluent in the good grammar of civility have deployed decorum to mask agendas of cruelty.” Together, he added, New Yorkers are “warmed against the January chill by the resurgent flame of hope.” Through communalism, “we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”

 

Unfortunately for mentally ill and addicted New Yorkers wandering the streets this winter, all the “warmth” that Mamdani said would flow from the city that’s being subjected to his socialistic experiment was entirely metaphorical.

 

So far, the prolonged cold snap that has settled over much of the eastern half of the United States has claimed the lives of no fewer than 13 homeless people on the streets of New York, according to the mayor’s office. In its own defense, a Mamdani administration spokesperson claimed that it had secured over “800 placements” for the homeless, but too many people continue to resist public services despite the risk of deadly exposure.

 

When pressed to explain why the city simply allows the noncompliant homeless to expire on the sidewalks, Mamdani explained that the city uses a variety of metrics to gauge an individual’s level of risk to themselves. “I think we can find some of this criteria also in how an individual is clothed,” he said, “whether they are deemed to actually be warmed in those settings.” Their “behavior” is also key to judging whether an individual is fit for street life.

 

“Involuntary confinement” remains a “last resort,” Mamdani explained. It’s a tool that city officials sometimes use. Still, the mayor expressed how proud he was of the city workers who “are continuing to canvas people again and again,” begging them unsuccessfully to avail themselves of the city’s facilities.

 

In fact, according to Mamdani, the problem isn’t so much the deaths of the homeless but, instead, how we interpret those deaths. “Too often, this is a crisis that is distilled only into statistics,” Mamdani continued. Sadly, those who engage with the homeless on an individual level will often “learn of how they have been failed by the city for years.” Indeed, the mayor expressed a note of solidarity with the recalcitrant homeless who reject city services “because of what their experience has been in the past.”

 

In reality, these are people who, by and large, are incapable of rationally calculating their interests. Of the 13 deaths so far — a figure that is expected to rise as the various agencies that compile such data report their findings — most victims suffered from mental health issues and substance-abuse problems. The city’s permissiveness toward them and their self-endangerment is mindless and morally bankrupt.

 

As the New York Post observed, the mayor steadfastly refused to “break up homeless encampments,” denouncing the practice pursued by his predecessor as cruel and a poor substitute for simply providing housing to those who can’t care for themselves. The solution to the problem of homelessness, he told the New York Times last year, involved “strengthening rental assistance, increasing transitional and supportive housing, expanding respite residences, tripling city-produced affordable housing and fully funding eviction-prevention services.” But each of these initiatives assumes that the city’s homeless want shelter. Not all do, even if that puts their lives at risk.

 

The mayor whom Mamdani succeeded in office, Eric Adams, understood the nature of the problem much better. “There is nothing ‘progressive’ about leaving people to freeze in makeshift encampments,” Adams wrote last year in opposition to Mamdani’s pledge to leave the homeless encampments in place. “It harms residents and dehumanizes the very people who need help.”

 

The god-awful deaths on the streets of New York City were foreseeable and preventable, and they’re unlikely to be the last foreseeable and preventable disaster under the new mayor.