Crisis to Care
Frequently Asked Questions
Like many other New Yorkers, I sometimes see someone on the train having a mental health breakdown. It makes me anxious. How will the Crisis to Care plan make me and my loved ones safer?
As elected officials who commute to work every day just like everybody else, we know this experience well. The Progressive Caucus’s plan aims to end the suffering we see on our streets, parks, and subways by scaling up programs that bring people out of crisis and into care. Our plan explicitly calls to end the growing waitlist for DOHMH’s Single Point of Access system by increasing the capacity of Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) and Forensic Assertive Community Treatment (FACT) teams. The plan also increases funding to programs that address underlying conditions that lead people to crisis, like supports for domestic violence survivors as well as supportive housing and substance use disorder programs.
I hear people talk about a lot of crises happening in this city (“affordability crisis”, “housing crisis”, etc.). What crisis are you talking about in your campaign?
The crisis we’re addressing with the campaign comes from years of austerity and years of ballooning mental health treatment waitlists under this mayoral administration. New Yorkers have a crisis of confidence in city government. They want real solutions and to feel safe in public. We see this crisis in the condition of our shared public spaces. New Yorkers with nowhere else to go continue to find themselves seeking refuge on our trains, and parks, and on the sidewalks. All New Yorkers deserve to feel safe and to have access to the mental health care that they need.
I hear involuntary removals are a priority for the mayor. Where do you stand on involuntary removals?
While we recognize that there is a place for placing individuals in long term care, state and local governments’ over reliance on involuntary removals too often treats this last resort option as a first response. Plus, a report on the involuntary transports that the city conducted in 2024 casts doubt on the effectiveness of this overall strategy. It finds that a large majority of involuntary removals took place from private dwellings, not from public spaces. The report also shows that Black and Brown New Yorkers are disproportionately likely to be involuntarily committed.
Our Crisis to Care plan will reduce the need for this practice. Foregrounding involuntary transports over the many mental and public health intervention programs makes little sense when our existing teams have shown success in connecting New Yorkers with stable housing and are far less costly. For too long, the Adams administration has underfunded the evidence-based programs we know work, leading to yearlong waitlists in some cases. We have to be honest about the state of mental health in New York City – most people in crisis need stronger connections to long term, comprehensive care, not to be taken away against their will.
How does your plan differ from the Mayor’s budget initiatives?
There are aspects of the mayor’s proposed budget that demonstrate a newfound commitment to tackling this challenging issue, like increasing the number of Safe Haven and Runaway and Homeless Youth shelter beds. However, the Adams administration has spent years undermining the foundations of our city’s mental health network. The mayor cut the number of clubhouses and defunded drug treatment programs. He swept away homeless encampments while refusing to fix our supportive housing system. Our plan is pragmatic, evidenced-based, and extends compassion to both people who feel unsafe and people who are in crisis.
How about first responders? Will this plan support the workers who provide vital mental health intervention and legal support services?
Our budget proposals will allow the City to hire 60 more peer specialists for the City’s mental health and crisis response teams, increasing their outreach capacity and reducing both the burden on existing mental health team staff and our city’s over reliance on police-centered responses. We know that this work is difficult and often traumatic, so our plan will create a unified system for crisis debriefing for EMTs. Additionally, we fully support UAW Local 2325’s demand that legal aid workers get a $70,000 salary floor and minimum annual 4.5% cost of living adjustments.
Why does your Caucus believe it has the solutions for this problem?
The Progressive Caucus does not come up with policy proposals out of thin air. To develop the Crisis to Care plan, we met with dozens and dozens of mental health experts, public safety advocates, union leaders, and city workers. The solutions we are advocating for are inexpensive, rooted in everyday realities, and look to many existing city services that have not had a chance to work at scale.
How are you going to pay for your plan?
The mayor’s budget proposals have consistently cut funds for important programs even while the city’s tax revenues continue to grow. We have the money to make these sensible, evidence-based changes right now – it just takes the political will to do the right thing. The current administration’s approach to mental health is extraordinarily expensive and wasteful. As it stands, Rikers Island jail is the city’s largest mental health facility. There are approximately 3,000 New Yorkers incarcerated on Rikers living with a serious mental illness. The cost to house a single person per year on Rikers is over half a million dollars, meaning we spend almost $1.7 billion annually to jail people living with serious mental health diagnoses. Our Crisis to Care plan does a lot with a little and would invest a fraction of the city’s extra funds – about $61 million – in upstream mental health systems and treatment programs,