Road to Ruin
Hookers & hawkers thrive in a lawless Gotham
MUNICIPAL decline is as much a state of mind as it is a state of affairs. When people accept that bad things are going to happen, they do.
Take that strip of mostly momand-pop shops on East Fordham Road in The Bronx, overrun by illegal peddlers to the extent that legit business owners can’t make a living.
Or that hooker haven in East New York, crowded with streetwalkers on weekend nights while pimps hang in the shadows, customers in cars casually window shop and the police pay scant attention.
This paper has been highlighting such activities lately, which is good, because while all Gotham’s shootings and stabbings and subway-shovings command immediate attention, it is the gradual corrosion of neighborhoods that will define the city’s future.
True enough, The Post’s reporting embarrassed Mayor de Blasio into busting up the Bronx bazaar Wednesday morning, but his attention span is notoriously short, and anyway, he’s yesterday’s news. The hawkers will be back, bet on it, because using cops as the mayor did Wednesday is illegal (see below), and thus the problem is institutional.
And just as official acts of ideological foolishness drive the shootings and so forth, the erosion of quality of life in the neighborhoods isn’t happening by itself, either.
It is the result of policy decisions taken at City Hall and the state Legislature that defy both common sense and simple decency — and which have yielded entirely predictable results.
The East Fordham Road chaos comprises peddler table after peddler table illegally erected on sidewalks in front of established businesses, often offering similar goods. The unlicensed hucksters have virtually no overhead, pay no taxes and thus present ruinous competition to local merchants.
So why doesn’t somebody call the cops? Well, in one of those post-George Floyd spasms that have been wreaking social havoc nationwide for a year now, the City Council has barred the NYPD from enforcing the relevant laws, instead vesting that responsibility in the Department of Consumer Affairs, which appears to have no appetite for such things. (Think of it as a variation on the bizarre notion of sending social workers, not cops, to deal with often-violent outbursts of public insanity; odds are they won’t show either.)
So good job, City Council.
Similarly, it didn’t take much imagination to predict what would happen when Brooklyn DA Eric Gonzalez announced an end to public-prostitution prosecutions. And when the state Legislature decriminalized streetwalking in the name of transvestite rights.
You got the East New York market: free to operate without regard to the almost certain presence of human trafficking, the brutal realities of pimp-supervised sidewalk prostitution, the degradation of the trade’s participants themselves and its caustic impact on neighborhoods.
It’s obvious that some people don’t want to obey the law, that sometimes the cops are mean guys and that it’s just easier to cave in to vocal criminals and their apologists than it is to stand up to them. Project that through a race prism, and quickly you have a formula for moral surrender. Decline creeps in on cowards’ feet.
The parallels between these policy decisions and those that are undoing the public safety and quality-of-life reforms of the early 1990s are obvious enough. If you do away with proven anti-gun practices, you’re going to get more shootings — a lot more. And if you consciously leave mentally ill and addicted vagrants to their own devices, you’re going to have a lot more of them on the streets, too. And those streets are going to be both more dangerous and more demoralizing.
There is no argument here that unnecessarily authoritarian law enforcement is to be guarded against. But it’s also true that liberty can quickly descend into license, and that lax or nonexistent enforcement can be profoundly destructive, both to communities and to the rule of law itself.
So what is to be anticipated when elected leaders and legislative bodies set about consciously to neuter the policies and practices supporting safe, relatively tranquil neighborhoods and other public spaces?
That’s easy. Expect to have children and other innocents hit by stray bullets as gang wars rage in housing projects. Expect vagrant encampments all over town. Expect unsafe subways. And expect Fordham Road peddler madness and in-your-face East New York streetwalking.
Time will tell whether the impending election of mayoral candidate Eric Adams marks a turnaround. Let’s hope. But all that’s certain for now is that the current trend lines are profoundly discouraging. Unnecessarily so.