Staten Island councilman calls on Mayor Mamdani to change course on handling homelessness

Staten Island City Councilman Frank Morano is calling for Mayor Zohran Mamdani to change course on how he's handling homelessness in the city.

He brought up the issue while discussing what Mamdani is doing right and wrong during an interview on this week's episode of "The Point with Marcia Kramer."

Morano first said he objected to a plan to build a 160-bed men's homeless shelter in his district.

"Why is it that Staten Island, and my district specifically, is supposed to do our fair share when it comes to things that our district doesn't want, but when it comes to city services that we vitally need like police, sanitation, transportation, we don't get our fair share there?" he said. "We are doing our fair share. We have capacity and beds for every single streeted homeless person on Staten Island. We're doing more than our fair share."

Morano said he would like to find a better place for the shelter that has more access to mass transit, mental health services, hospitals and services that would help people living in the shelter find jobs.

He also added he disagrees with the mayor's decision to not have police respond to 311 complaints about homeless encampments.

"There's nothing compassionate about letting people set up shop and camp on the street. That does no good for anybody," Morano said.

He called the weather-related deaths during the brutally cold weather at the beginning of the year one of the worst aspects of the mayor's record, along with his handling of the deadly Legionnaires' disease cluster on the Upper East Side this summer.

"We're talking life and death on issues like Legionnaires' and homelessness," Morano said. "He's gotta change course, and I hope he will."

Click here to watch the full episode, which also includes Kramer's interview with Ofir Akunis, Consul General of Israel in New York, about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's United Nations General Assembly speech and more.