Gotham in Decline

New York City’s relentless crime spike and chaos on the streets make it painfully clear: Gotham — significant parts of it, anyway — is headed for a steep decline. The big question now is whether it can be stopped.

As The Post reported Monday, shootings in the city are running at nearly twice the rate as last year. As of Saturday, there have been 821 outbursts of gunfire, with 1,000 victims this year; 2019 saw just 446 shootings, with 551 victims at this same point.

Police recorded a dozen gunplay incidents Saturday into Sunday morning alone. At least four people were killed over the weekend.

Vagrants and addicts, meanwhile, began commandeering public streets long before the pandemic, with Mayor de Blasio doing little to address the problem.

On Manhattan’s Upper West Side after the outbreak — as The Post reported last week — the city moved hundreds of vagrants into hotels. Men are now seen peeing or masturbating in public or lying sprawled out on the streets. A 40-yearold woman was randomly stabbed near the subway at 72nd Street. Convicted rapists and sex abusers were stuffed into a hotel just a block from the PS 87 playground.

The Post’s Doree Lewak reported Sunday that even one of the most vocal anti-crime activists in the area, Elizabeth Carr (among others), is giving up and moving away.

“We reached our New York expiration date,” Carr sighed. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction.” A friend, she noted, couldn’t even find a broker to sell her apartment at 72nd Street and Columbus, a usually highly sought-after location.

De Blasio’s response is simply to rail that the crime and chaos are “unacceptable.” But his own policies — and new state and city laws — have fueled the problem.

Neither he, nor Gov. Cuomo, nor state lawmakers, all of whom share blame, care to address those laws and policies.

Columnist Kyle Smith argues that there’s “no push for law and order” in the city. “New Yorkers aren’t hypocrites,” Smith writes, “they’re masochists.”

We hope he’s wrong. Because without public pressure, decline is inevitable.