Hell’s Kitchen in New York City was rough when I was a young adult attending school in Midtown. Its environment is even more harsh now, as homeless encampments and shanty towns have overtaken the areas of West 45th and 46th Streets along Twelfth Avenue.

The area is near the Intrepid Museum, between the museum parking and an Aamazon warehouse.

A food cart vendor who works nearby is at wits end. He has called 911, with no response. But, the New York Department of Sanitation has come by.

This sounds like a @TheBabylonBee headline

— joe (@jeepjoe) July 10, 2026

While the title does sound like a Babylon Bee article, real life does imitate fiction. The homeless-or should I say-home free-love Zohran Mamdani. Drug-abuse on display. Dudes strutting around in women’s underwear. Stench, dirt, filth. But, hey, at least the garbage trucks pick up trash and oh-the outreach workers!

Now, I just want to say.Nothing is wrong with outreach.The outreach workers are most likely NOT Mamdani’s doing, however, but local organizations comprised of residents who come together to make sandwiches and bring food and blankets. I’m sure some of these outreach personnel are Search and Rescue, too, attempting to get addicts off the streets and in shelters and on the track to being clean. But, like everything in this life, adults have free will and choices. And the choice to get clean is not a priority for some.

Mamdani is awesome. He, like, did a whole paradigm shift on homelessness and care. Before, when the police were doing their sweeps, the cleanups and site checks, there was a lot of pressure. I noticed that it’s a lot more outreach workers instead of sending police officers. So now we have, on average, about three different organizations”-Markus C.

Markus C. is homeless. It’s all so much better than the days of Mayor Eric Adams and his “sweeps” and arrests. The “pressure” most on the street face? Go to a shelter and get clean. Maybe save your own life. Maybe save the heartache of a mother who has experienced many a sleepless night wondering when she will get that phone call. Mamdani is not putting this “pressure” on them. Such a compassionate guy! More from Mamndani’s constituents:

With Eric Adams when they talked about sweeps … they would literally come in, they’d arrest me and then throw everything away. That was the way it was before. And then the newer mayor has been more keen on well, during heightened weather, like, when it’s stormy, taking action — bringing it in, at least temporarily, or helping get whatever was necessary. The homeless outreach, it’s been a lot of that. They walk around, they bring food to people all the time now. They bring supplies, try to give us shelters, there’s a lot more than before.”

Try to give us shelters. Read: They try. Many decide NOT to go because it means they cannot take their drugs with them.

In fact, all the sweeps were stopped:

Because Mamdani’s team does not want to be those people. They are coming by to pick up the trash though. Which is a bit humorous since Mamdani and the Department of Sanitation could not get their act together to save their lives this past winter.

There’s been more than a paradigm shift in homelessness and care. But is it care, really? There’s no care for the business owners, that is for certain. And the paradigm shift, while it looks like compassion, is actually enabling. So, there’s that. Unfortunately, while there are some individuals in homeless communities who have just fallen on hard luck, a share of them choose to live on the streets and continue to do drugs. At least, maybe, an innocent New Yorker walking his or her dog will not come into contact with foil and accidentally “overdose” on Fentanyl because the trash is being picked up. A jogger may have a different issue, though…

You get a lot of joggers that have to jump over them..”-a security guard at The Intrepid

It's true. And they shoot up right out on the sidewalk in broad daylight. It's a Kensington/Philly-esque drug area in the making.

— Dio Venkas (@diovenkas) July 11, 2026

And while Zohran Mamdani flat-out refuses to acknowledge Little Italy or the Jewish and Irish enclaves, he takes special care to acknowledge the home-free communities who are contributing absolutely nothing to one of the greatest cities in the world. The Italians, the Irish, the Jewish, and other ethnic groups and nationalities, who have built businesses, bridges and buildings (that are not falling part), mean absolutely nothing to the mayor and his attempts to turn New York City into his heaping third-world socialist utopia freaking trash pile. Hell’s Kitchen, once upon a time, was a community comprised of many working-class Irish-Americans. I remember walking through the neighborhood as a child on one of my many Saturday jaunts with my dad to see The Intrepid. Truthfully, Hell’s Kitchen was always a little gritty and yes, in later years, I did my share of underage drinking in college at a bar there that never bothered to ask for ID, stumbling over to a corner diner at around 3am.

Never did I remember hurdling over humans in some strange zombie apocalypse in those days. At most, I had to avoid getting mugged. But hey, nothing says “warm and fuzzy collectivism” like jumping over strung-out drug addicts in Hell’s Kitchen on a hot, summer’s day. This, to some, is the paradigm shift New York needed. This, to most of Manhattan, is progress. Little Ireland in Hell’s Kitchen is now the Little Homeless Enclave. You can get there by the A, C, E and the 1 trains.

Feature Image: Bingjiefu He, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons/edited in Canva Pro