Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Appears Live on the Conversation with Cardinal Dolan

November 26, 2019

Father Dave Dwyer: You are tuned in to Conversation with Cardinal Dolan. I am Father Dave Dwyer, and please don’t forget to call and share with us your Thanksgiving traditions at 8-8-8-3-2-2-8-4-6-5. Our next guest has served as the 109th Mayor of the City of New York since 2014. Mayor Bill de Blasio, welcome to Conversation with Cardinal Dolan.

Mayor Bill de Blasio: It is my great pleasure to be joining you and happy Thanksgiving to all.

Cardinal Timothy Dolan: Same to you, Mayor de Blasio. Thanks for being with us, it was good to see you this morning. I hope you were listening – I had my mom on the phone, Mayor with some of our favorite thanksgiving recipes. And the people in your city, that is now my city, Mayor – make fun of us in the Midwest for green bean casseroles and Jell-O mold. And I just had enough of it. So I had mom on to give us the recipe.

[Laughter]

Mayor: Well, your Eminence, I have to say that it is quite clear you have enjoyed your mother’s cooking for many years.

[Laughter]

Cardinal Dolan: Let’s move right to the next guest.

[Laughter]

Mayor, I usually get one over on you. This is fair play here.

Mayor: I thought I was channeling you there.

[Laughter]

Cardinal Dolan: Well, listen – beautiful, simple, but sincere prayer service we had this morning. I don’t know if our listeners knew. With the Mayor’s inspiration, we rebooted about six, seven years ago something called the Commission of Religious Leaders that kind of has always been at the service of our public officials – an ecumenical and a religious group, especially to be with the city in times of crisis. Anyway, we had a prayer service at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral for the homeless, and the Mayor was there. And I was very moved by it. Weren’t you?

Mayor: Yes, absolutely, I have to tell you. First of all, my profound thanks to you on behalf of the people of this city for bringing CORL back to life, because it’s really been your leadership, your willingness to host the gatherings and give people a sense of how much it mattered because you put time into it. But what I see now is exciting – it’s a group of really meaningful leaders of all faiths who gather in common cause. And you know in some moments of crisis, the fact that all of you were gathered to be a moral and positive voice for the city, made a huge, huge difference. So this is a good news story we should be thankful for.

Cardinal Dolan: We’re easy to work with Mayor de Blasio, and one of the priorities of your now – of your six years as Mayor – he’s real a made priority about the homeless. And that was today we prayed and I – you know, Mayor de Blasio – I had a lump in my throat as I was calling out the names of these four homeless people that now we’ve identified, sadly, there are more who were killed – the homeless people, either by violence of by exposure. And I just want to read them again: Chuen Kwok, Anthony L. Manson, Florencio Moran, and Nazario A. Vazquez Villegas. And as you mentioned, Mayor, it’s good for us to know these homeless people, they have names, they have parents. Some of them have kids, they’ve got stories, they’ve got lives, they’ve got an inherent dignity as children of god. And sometimes we reduce them to a case or a number. And I think this morning helped us say “wait a minute, they belong to the human family.”

Mayor: It was very powerful – especially in such a beautiful and moving setting – to have the humanity of these individuals really noted and understood. You’ve written about this the way unfortunately our society in some ways teaches us to walk by that person in the street and not give them a name and not give them a human identity, and how we have to understand that it really is matter of “there but for the grace of God, go I.” I have talked to homeless people – in fact just a few weeks ago when we announced a really substantial a new outreach effort – right after the announcement a guy comes up to me, and you would have thought he was just another professional walking down the street, and he came up and admitted to me he had been homeless for quite a while, and had lost a very good job, and lost his way, and couldn’t pay the bills, and his family had come undone, and there’s a lot of stories out there of people – it’s not, it’s not just that folks who are poor, folks who even only had a mental health condition of something like that. There’s a lot of stories. And we’ve got to see these each as human beings who went on a path and something went wrong and they ended on the streets and we’ve got to find a path back and family members and friends can play such a profound role. And the thing I talked about this morning asking all New Yorkers if God forbid one of your family members or someone you’re close to is one the streets and you can help us be part of the solution, just pick up the phone and call 3-1-1 and we will make sure that a senior person from our team speaks to you and figures out a game plan with you, because a lot of times these families are so ready to take their loved one back but they need help finding them or we need help understanding what we can say or do to help that person on the street to feel trust and confidence again. And so we need, we need families to be a part of the solution. It’s really a crucial moment.

Cardinal Dolan: You’ve been a great leader in this, Mayor de Blasio, and other things as well. But like yourself, I’ll sometimes engage the homeless in conversations just to say “what’s your name, how’s it going, what do you need” and very often – now, as you know, Mayor, sometimes, let’s face it, the homeless aren’t easy to interact with because some of them are suffering a severe mental condition, but more often than not, when I do get a conversation, I will often say to them “would you like to call your parents, or is there somebody you’d like to call at home that’s worried about you and wondering where you’re at?” Because so often, like you just said, that happens. And boy, you’ll call, and the parents will start – I’ll usually make the call and I’ll introduce myself, and I’ll say are you okay with taking a call from your son? Or your brother? And most of the time they just start crying and saying “oh my God, where is he? We didn’t know where he was at, we tried to get in touch with him,” and it’s a very, beautiful, beautiful, tender moment. And reminding me again that these are children of God, these are members of families.

Mayor, we’ve got – there’s no town or city in the United State that does not have a challenge with our beloved homeless. New York obviously would have a towering one only because of our size, but yet we’ve made some great strides, haven’t we? You mentioned a couple statistics this morning to say wait a minute, we’re making some progress here.

Mayor: Absolutely, one of the things we realized was if we’re going address the exact kind of scenario you just laid out, very, very poignantly – we have to approach each individual, no matter if it takes a dozen times or a hundred times or more, with really well trained social workers and people who have devoted their lives to winning the trust of the homeless folks and we send these professionals out, no matter how many times it takes, and what we’re finding is, over time they do win the trust of folks, even if they have serious mental health issues or substance abuse issues, and have been able to get people in in a way we were never able to achieve before. So really over the last three years it’s a very moving number. It’s 2,200 people, and that’s a lot of lives.

Cardinal Dolan: Thank God, yeah.

Mayor: 2,200 people have come in who were just permanently street homeless, they’ve come in, they’ve accepted shelter. A lot of them now are getting mental health services, they’re getting substance treatment. Their lives are turning around, we’re getting them to permanent housing. This is now working. This is why this part that we talked about today, and you just evoked it perfectly, if there’s a family member who’s listening and says “you know what, I think I know where my loved one is, or dear friend, who says I think I know, or I think I can help, or I think I can give that caseworker some information that would help them win the trust.” These are the kinds of things that could be crucial to getting the next person to come in. And then their lives turn around. We’re talking about 2,200 people who now have the potential to get back to a positive life and in so many cases will be reunited with their families. We want to make those families our true allies and for so many of them, as you said, they’ve yearned for the day where their loved one would come home, but they have felt powerless, they haven’t known where to turn. We want them now to really be our partners in turning folks’ lives around.

Cardinal Dolan: Let’s hope so. Mayor, one more thing I’ll let you go. This is a cause – sometimes I think the homeless challenge is a subset of the mental health crisis in which Chirlane, your wife, has been such a leader in that, because what do you do? What are your experts, the people who work with you down there in at City Hall, what happens when a homeless person resists help? Doesn’t want any help at all?

Mayor: The reality—

Cardinal Dolan: It’s a tragedy.

Mayor: It’s a reality our experts deal with all the time and I would say there’s two, two answers: most of the time, persistence and winning trust, and proving that we can make someone’s life better, a lot of folks, even if they have a mental health problem, if they’re cold, if they’re hungry, if they need medical care, they are conscious of those realities and if they really believe they’ll be taken someplace safe and they trust the individuals involved, a lot of them will ultimately make that decision that’s the most likely path. But there are folks who we know are unfortunately in such a troubled state that they’re actually a danger to themselves, they’re actually unable to take care of their own health and wellbeing. And those folks we do, when appropriate, have the ability to have them come in and get assessed by medical professionals under the law, and make sure, you know – it’s not morally sound if we see someone who really could be a threat to themselves or others to just leave them there we have an obligation to act.

Cardinal Dolan: I think you’re right, I think you’re right. That’s – I think the experts call that an intervention for their good, for the good of people around that we have to try our best to help, so Mayor keep up the good work, Happy Thanksgiving to you and Chirlane and the family, and thanks especially for your leadership on homelessness – let’s keep talking about it.

Mayor: And thank you for all you’re doing for this city and a very Happy Thanksgiving to you and all, everyone listening at home.