J.C. Rice for NY Post They own the street — whether New Yorkers like it or not.
A homeless couple — or should I say “unhoused,” a euphemism that implies victimhood — lives outside in filth in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s New York. Boozing. Sexing. Using the sidewalk as an al fresco toilet.
Threatening families, workers, the eyes of schoolkids and reporters.
And authorities shrug and do nothing, claiming they can’t force the filthy and aggressive pair to leave or, at a minimum, wash. Not as long as lefty policies treat them as poor, downtrodden recipients of society’s disgust rather than entitled perverts luxuriating in squalor of their own making.
Pretty soon, I fear, fed-up and desperate neighborhood vigilantes will drive the troublesome twosome out of Queens, where they bed down in the shadow of the mayor’s former home.
Because how can we live like this — when they’re allowed to live like this?
How did this city sink so low that laws give priority to the rights of street pervs over decent and hard-working folks?
As The Post revealed on Sunday, the dirty twosome, who give their names as Michael and Marabel, have been living on a block of Astoria for at least a month amid a mountain of garbage they created, between a Duane Reade pharmacy and a New York Sports Club.
They were spotted one day by a horrified gym-goer as Marabel performed oral sex on Michael, providing free advanced sex education to students of at least four nearby schools.
One morning, a neighborhood resident says, he saw Marabel holding a pizza box for Michael to poop in.
And when cleaners hired to work at a nearby building last week attempted to make them give up the prime real estate, a Post reporter witnessed Michael hurling a series of epithets between taking slugs from a bottle of Voda vodka.
And, “I shoot people,” he spat at the scribe, saying he served in the US Marine Corps.
You’d think that would be enough to cause an emergency eviction, not only for the safety of area residents, but for the health and security of the squatters themselves. Their unsanitary lifestyles and threatening behavior clearly put them at grave risk for everything from disease to exposure to the elements to bodily harm inflicted by outraged onlookers.
One would assume this kind of behavior would not be tolerated. And that Michael’s agitated rantings would be enough to prompt the pair’s forcible removal from the street.
On Monday, the couple remained in their outdoor domain. They’re still living amid garbage, though some of the trash pile appeared to have been taken away.
They still pose a dire threat to the people of Astoria, as well as to themselves. But at a recent community meeting, officials from the police department’s 114th Precinct shockingly blamed legal loopholes for excusing the couple’s deplorable living conditions and actions.
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For one, city officials say their living area doesn’t qualify as an encampment that can be cleared away because it does not include any built structures.
Huh? So they must build a house before authorities can knock it down?
Also, police, who’ve received multiple calls about the couple, claim they had no proof of illegal activities. They say they can’t force the cussing, defecating, threatening duo off the street without their consent!
I feel as if I’ve entered bizarro world. A planet in which people who brazenly call for violence, and a man who boasts of wielding a firearm, are protected while the rest of us are expected to sit back and take it.
This is not about money. It’s not about a housing crisis. New York City spends hundreds of millions of dollars to house the homeless. Michael and Marabel could go to a shelter anytime they wanted — they simply refuse.
The progressives’ twisted idea of “compassion” is to let the two of them drink themselves to death on the street, in full view. It’s madness.
And still no comment from Socialist City Councilwoman Tiffany Caban, whose office is just blocks from the nauseating campsite. No comment from any city official, all of whom are studiously protecting this couple’s right to wreak havoc.
