A cleaning crew found a man's skeletonized body wedged inside a couch in a Brooklyn home for the mentally ill Thursday — and nobody in the building had any idea he was dead. That single fact should haunt every politician who has presided over the hollowing out of New York's civic life.

The New York Post and Staten Island Advance both reported the same grim details: cleaners arrived at the building on Union Street and Utica Avenue in Crown Heights around 8:50 a.m. A resident called the cops, mistaking the crew for burglars — because, apparently, nobody told the people living there that cleaners were coming. Officers left after determining there was no break-in. They returned 30 minutes later after the crew made their discovery: the skeletal remains of a man, decomposed beyond recognition, stuffed inside a sofa.

The building houses mentally ill and disabled residents, according to the Post. The city Medical Examiner is working to identify the man and determine how he died. Whether this was a crime or a tragedy of neglect remains unknown.

But here's what is already known: a human being decomposed to bone inside a couch in a building full of people, and no one noticed. No one checked. No one asked where this man went. The Post framed it as a macabre crime story; the Advance kept it clinical and brief. Neither outlet asked the question that matters: what kind of system leaves the vulnerable so isolated that they can literally vanish inside the furniture and no one comes looking?

This is the logical endpoint of progressive urban governance. New York's political class has spent decades dismantling the institutions that once bound communities together — churches, fraternal organizations, neighborhood watches, the two-parent family — and replacing them with bureaucracy. Group homes run on state contracts. Social workers who clock out at five. A 311 number that nobody calls because nobody expects it to work. The result is a city of strangers stacked on top of each other, sharing walls and nothing else.

Crown Heights is represented by politicians who campaign on