NYC NOW - August 21, 2023: Midday News

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

New York State is putting up more money to help with casework for migrants as they leave New York City shelters. Meanwhile, City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging New York's homeless services agency to focus on moving so-called long-time stayers out of shelters and into housing. And WNYC's politics reporter Giulia Heyward tries to follow Mayor Eric Adams' much-discussed diet.

NYC now. Welcome to NYC now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. It's Monday, August 21st. Here's the midday news from Lance Luffy. New York State is putting more money to help with casework for migrants as they leave New York City shelters. Governor Kathy Hochle's office says they're setting aside $20 million for the effort. The governor's office says the money will go toward Connecticut. connecting migrants with caseworkers who can help them seek asylum and move on from the shelters. It comes as the state continues to face pressure to do more to help the city. Mayor Adams' office says the city is providing shelter for more than 50,000 migrants.

City Comptroller Brad Lander is urging New York's homeless services agency to devote more resources toward efforts to move so-called long-time stayers out of shelters and into permanent housing. More than 80,000 people are staying in the city's main homeless shelter system, and many have been there for years. Lander's latest shelter system audit calls on the city to get those New Yorkers into housing as quickly as possible. Prioritizing folks who have been in the system a long time and focusing on those folks who are sleeping on the street

makes a lot of sense. But the Department of Homeless Services is criticizing the scope of the report. A spokesperson says the agency helped 15,000 households move into permanent homes last year. The woman who was bitten by a shark at Rockaway Beach earlier this month has been left, permanently disabled from the attack. According to her family, 65-year-old Tatiana Colchinac is still in the hospital after undergoing five surgeries.

She was swimming in the ocean near Beach 59th Street, August 7th, when a shark bit her in the leg. It was the first confirmed shark bite at the beach in decades. Her family has set up a go-fund me page to raise money for her ongoing care. It's 83 now, just a few clouds in near 91 today, back to around 80 tomorrow. And for the rest of the week, no mention of rain at this point until Thursday night. Now to politicians and the food they eat. Since Mayor Eric Adams took office last year, there has been a fair amount of attention paid to his mostly vegan diet. While this week, one of our reporters tried to eat like the mayor.

Armed with his cookbook, the mayor's social media post about his meals, and the produce section at Trader Joe's, WNYC Politics Reporter Julia Hayward attempted to follow the mayor's diet. As part of the latest installment in our series called I Tried It, she recently set down with my colleague David First to tell us how it went. You gave the mayor's much-discussed diet a chance this past week, and we'll get to how that went in just a moment. But first, can you talk about why Mayor Adams decided to shift to this mostly plant-based diet? The basic breakdown for people who don't already know is that in 2016,

he gets a type 2 diabetes diagnosis, rocks as well. For a while, he tends to do, you know, the traditional route with medication, and he decides one day that what he's going to do instead is opt into a Whole Foods plant-based vegan diet. He's able to reverse his symptoms, and the diet's pretty much stuck since then. His struggle with diabetes is an experience that a lot of people in the city can relate to. Does that get lost in the shuffle when the media talks about his vegan diet? So that's actually a really good question. I read his book, Healthy at Last, which is part memoir, part cookbook, where he talks about his journey to becoming a vegan. And he talks about being a black man growing up with an African-American family and having to examine the way that his family members eat, the legacy of soul food and just the rate of diabetes within with the people that look like him. As a black woman myself, my dad is African-American. I found myself really touched by that portion. of the book. I think it's really easy sometimes because of a lot of his food restrictions and then the whole question of whether or not he really is a vegan. I think that there is a lot of

coverage of that. And I get why, because it is funny and interesting. But I do think that there's something really sincere here that sometimes gets lost. Funny and interesting because he says he's vegan and then someone says, oh, I caught you eating fish. Yeah. And then I mean, some of the food rules, which he talks about in his book, I mean, no soda, no oil. He does not cook with oil at all. A lot of his recipes include these ingredients that I've never heard of before I tried this challenge. I get it. It's really interesting. Okay, let's talk about your attempt to eat like the mayor. How did you try to determine what Mayor Adams eats on any given day? Okay, so I did have some limits, right? I do not have the same salary as the mayor. And so I opted

for foods off of his social media post and his sort of recipe book that were a lot of meals that would require ingredients that I could sort of use more than once. I just kind of picked recipes that had the simplest, shortest list of ingredients for them. So how was the food and how did you do? So breakfast was usually a smoothie or oatmeal. The mayor is very reliant on his fancy schmancy blender. I had a magic bullet. that I used. So a lot of the meals were just blitzing things and then consuming them in like liquid form. So I generally would have a smoothie or oatmeal for breakfast. Soup was generally my lunch. And then dinner was kind of a wildcard. Some days it was pasta with vegan sausage and kale

or pasta with black beans and mushrooms. Other times I had this vegan taco salad, which was just walnuts and mushroom in place of beef, which isn't super filling. And as far as how I fared, I lasted three and a half days. Okay. Wait a minute. You lasted three and a half days. It was hard. I, you know, don't have a chef.

He's making these foods for me. And I mean, I'm so used to, one thing that the mayor doesn't do is he doesn't do processed foods. So anything that comes into a package, right? And so a lot of my comfort foods, foods that I generally find myself reaching for on my way to work in the morning or in between meals when I don't have time to cook a full. sort of entree to eat. I couldn't have those. I couldn't have, you know, my protein bars and my protein shakes or like prepackaged yogurts. I couldn't really do that stuff. What were you feeling like when you bailed? I was hungry. I ended up skipping some meals or only having a bite or two descending. It was gross and then just having sleep for dinner. Okay. A friend invited me to get sushi.

I love sushi so much. I had the salmon out avocado roll. The mayor is known to have Brandzino from time to time, it was not a very fancy Branzino dish, but it tasted just as good, I promise you. Is there a chance that you would perhaps mix in some of these items with your regular diet in the future? I could see myself having soup a lot of the week when it gets a bit colder. The sweet potato soup recipe was really good. I think I would have added some milk, even if it's a plant-based milk, to make it a bit creamier. I think it forced me to think about more ways that I could be incorporating fruits or vegetables into what I eat. and I'd like to think that that's something I'll continue to do now.

But I think I do have a newfound respect for the mayor in that it's one thing to have to deal with, you know, governing one of the largest cities in the world, but doing it on a diet of like kale and black beans only. No cheese ever. I mean, it's rough. It's hard. And I admire that. That's WNYC Politics Reporter Julia Hayward

talking with my colleague, David Furr. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep dives. And subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We'll be back this evening.