Lander Vows to End Street Homelessness for Mentally Ill People as Mayor

Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor, will announce a major plan to address homelessness after a series of violent attacks on the subway.

Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller who is running for mayor, will unveil his signature campaign issue on Monday: trying to end homelessness on the streets and subways for people with severe mental illness.

The problem has vexed leaders in many large cities, but perhaps none more so than in New York, where a recent series of violent attacks on the subway has rekindled safety concerns and heightened calls for law enforcement and the courts to do more to keep troubled people off the streets.

Mr. Lander’s 75-page-plus plan calls for expanding subway outreach teams and embracing a “housing first” model that has been successful in other cities, including Houston and Denver. Mr. Lander would focus on roughly 2,000 homeless people with serious mental illness and place them in vacant apartments known as single-room-occupancy units, or S.R.O.s.

“New Yorkers are stressed out about lack of safety on the subway and our streets, and a huge amount of that is mentally ill homeless folks who, in some cases, become a real danger, as we’ve seen in recent weeks,” he said. “We dug in and realized this is a solvable problem.”

Mr. Lander said he believed he could get most or all homeless people with serious mental illness off the streets and into some form of supportive housing in his first two years as mayor. The plan would cost about $100 million in the first year, and roughly $30 million per year thereafter, with about half going toward renovating vacant single-occupancy apartments that would provide an array of on-site services.

The number of people living in the streets and subways of New York City was estimated at 4,140 last year — the highest level in nearly two decades. Rents have soared, and roughly one in eight public school students is homeless.