Last week Mayor Adams and conservative media told New Yorkers to start panicking about Zohran Mamdani’s plan to end homeless sweeps. Really, we should be relieved. After decades of failed homeless policy, finally we have a leader who is promising to try something different, and more importantly, to implement policies that are humane and effective.
The fact is, encampment sweeps don’t help homeless people get off the streets. They don’t help homeless people at all. Instead, sweeps destroy the last belongings a homeless person has, push that person to a different location where they remain homeless, and at some point that same homeless person is swept again, and the cycle continues. The city’s own data, shows that it has been sweeping the same locations, and even the same homeless individuals, again and again. Meanwhile, for years, it has continually failed to reduce the number of people struggling to survive in the city’s streets.
New Yorkers, both housed and unhoused, see the failures of Adams’ homeless policies every day. And the administration’s own reports confirm what our eyes tell us. By its own account, the Adams administration spent more than $6.4 million sweeping thousands of homeless encampments between January 2024 and June 2025. Yet they housed precisely zero people through this process. In fact, they didn’t even offer to house anyone in these 4,000-plus sweeps.
And the painful truth is, it stands to reason that the city didn’t house anyone through these encampment sweeps. Once you tell someone their mere presence in public space is a crime and throw away everything they own, why would they then accept your help? Plus, now they have to focus on replacing what you threw away, including the documentation they need to apply for housing. Sweeps actually set homeless people back, ruin their relationships with outreach workers, and make it less likely that they will be able to secure housing.
With not a single person housed, Mamdani was right to say that this homeless policy cannot be called a success. Given that encampment sweeps have comprehensively failed to address homelessness and the Adams administration is also facing a legal challenge over their constitutionality, it makes sense that the new mayor is promising a long-overdue course correction. We should welcome that change.
Last week our group, the Safety Net Activists, which includes homeless New Yorkers, slept outside City Hall to call for a new day in homeless policy. Homeless New Yorkers are part of the community and are well aware of the impacts of street homelessness — on homeless individuals and the broader community. No one is asking for the “tent cities” or “shantytowns” some press outlets are stoking fears of. Instead, when we speak with homeless folks in the street, they routinely say that of course they would go inside if offered a safe and dignified option, and of course they would accept permanent housing.
Right now, those options aren’t on offer — but they could be. We have more than 5,000 vacant supportive housing units with specialized social services for the homeless, and somewhere near that number of homeless people living on the street. We also have housing subsidy laws the Adams administration has refused to implement that would help people get housing and stay in it. And, we could start creating access to single rooms instead of unsafe, dehumanizing warehouse shelters. These are humane solutions that would actually address the issue all New Yorkers want to see solved.
While Adams and the conservative press want to persuade New Yorkers that targeting homeless individuals is the solution, we know this is a systemic issue. We live in a city that is unaffordable to working people, who struggle to pay high rents and put food on the table, while the federal government slashes food stamps and Medicaid.
More than 100,000 New Yorkers live in homeless shelters, while an untold number live doubled and tripled-up, searching for housing they can afford and trying to avoid the shelter system. In the last school year, more than 154,000 (more than one in seven) of our public school students experienced homelessness.
In an unaffordable city, the harsh reality of street homelessness is not a personal choice. As the Mamdani said, it is a political choice. And, until now, our political leaders have failed us by making the same choices year after year. That’s why it is clearly time for a new day for homeless New Yorkers, and for all of us.
Moore is a Safety Net Activist. Dias is director of the Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center.
