MTA removes tweet explaining why benches at metro stations were removed

The MTA has once again found itself in the crosshairs of a debate over how it treats homeless people sleeping or resting in the subway. On Friday, someone the MTA described as a “junior” employee responded to a tweet asking why the benches had been removed from the 23rd Street F / M subway station. The employee, who used the initials JP, said wrote to the concerned commuter that the benches had been removed to “prevent the homeless from sleeping on them”.

The tweet was quickly deleted, and the MTA declined to comment on why the benches were deleted.

In a statement, MTA spokesman Abbey Collins wrote that the tweet was posted in error, adding: “The subway is not a substitute for a shelter and homeless New Yorkers deserve much better care. We have worked with the City on this important issue and asked for more dedicated medical and mental health resources that are urgently needed to address the homelessness crisis that has been exacerbated by the pandemic.

Still, she declined to say how many benches have been removed across the system in the past year, or whether the benches have been removed to prevent homeless people from using them, as the tweet says.

While the MTA blames the city for not doing more to deal with the ongoing housing crisis, in which recently and chronically homeless New Yorkers have sought refuge on the subway, it also hasn’t hid its own efforts to prevent people from spending too much or overnight in the system. The removal of the benches from the 23rd Street station could be the latest example.

Last February, the MTA removed the backs of the metro benches. When Governor Cuomo launched an aesthetic and expensive upgrade to the stations in the summer of 2016, it included the installation of “leaning bars” and dividers on benches, moves that were widely seen as forms of architecture. hostile intended to prevent the homeless from going to bed.

Last May, Cuomo ordered the very first night subway service shutdown. The MTA says the nightly closures are about disinfecting trains (which experts say is no longer a primary transmission route for COVID-19) and not eliminating the homeless, although that is what happens between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m.

“Governor Cuomo cannot solve the housing crisis by displacing the homeless and shutting down the subway to travelers overnight,” Riders Alliance director of policy and communications Danny Pearlstine told Gothamist / WNYC . “[It] does not solve the housing crisis, the removal of benches does not solve it either.

Joe Rappaport, general manager of the Brooklyn Center for Independence of the Disabled (BCID), noticed that benches had been removed from his local station in Borough Hall a little over a year ago, so he wrote a letter to the MTA.

“And their response was, ‘We got complaints from people that a homeless man was using the bench and hanging out there, and so we took it out,” Rappaport told Gothamist / WNYC. “It was also a bench that I used often and saw other people, mostly old people, use.”

Rappaport is a plaintiff in three lawsuits against the MTA for failing to comply with the United States Disability Act and the New York City Human Rights Act on accessible stations.

“At the end of the day, what happens is people who might need a bench to sit on because they have a disability or are just tired at the end of the day, are the losers, ”Rappaport said.