NYC moms fleeing Upper West Side amid crime and chaos

However, the people packing their bags are not coming to New York City — they’re fleeing it for good.

Due to increasingly squalid conditions on the Upper West Side, including two new homeless shelters packed with junkies and registered sex offenders, longtime dwellers are departing the Big Apple with no plans to ever return.

One of the Escape from New Yorkers is Elizabeth Carr, one of the area’s most vocal leaders in combatting mounting crime in the well-heeled hood. She was an administrator of the Facebook group “NYC Moms for Safer Streets,” and the face of a public-safety movement that has attracted thousands to demand better policing and city services.

“In the best of times, NYC is a hard place to live,” said Carr. “Now you have all this other stuff.  It’s a question for families. … to have to see a guy masturbating on the corner or explain to my kids while I’m buying diapers at Duane Reade why this guy wearing no shoes is collapsed on the floor and they’re doing CPR on him.”

She said she started planning to move before the COVID crisis and recent neighborhood developments, but officially put down stakes Sunday in North Carolina with her finance husband and three kids under 7.

“We reached our New York expiration date,” the former nonprofit exec, who’d lived on the UWS since 2007, told The Post from her new home 600 miles away. “Things weren’t heading in the right direction. What we’re seeing now isn’t at all surprising.”

Crimes committed over the past several days would’ve been unheard of a year ago in the quiet neighborhood that’s home to Lincoln Center and restaurants by Daniel Boulud. A 40-year-old woman was randomly stabbed in the 72nd Street subway station at noon on Thursday; a 56-year-old man was sucker-punched while dining outdoors with his wife Wednesday night; photos were posted online of a man masturbating on the steps of the New York Historical Society; and onlookers witnessed an apparent overdose in the aisle of a Duane Reade across the street from the Lucerne Hotel.

The Lucerne, on 79th Street and Amsterdam, and Hotel Belleclaire, on 76th Street and Broadway, were recently converted into homeless shelters, with nearly 300 vagrants between them. Ten of the men are registered sex offenders, including convicted rapists, child molesters and child-porn possessors — all living a block away from a school playground.

The alarming downturn of her beloved neighborhood, Carr said, makes it hard to look on the bright side.... (Read more)

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