Mayor Mamdani plans this week to reinstate homeless encampment sweeps — reversing a promise he made on the campaign trail to end the practice.
The about-face comes after Mamdani faced backlash for ending the sweeps days into his term during the freezing-cold stretch in January and February, when several homeless New Yorkers died while out in the cold. There’s no indication that any of them were living in encampments when they perished, according to the administration.
The Mamdani administration will have the Department of Homeless Services lead the sweep efforts, instead of the Police Department, the mayor announced Wednesday.
Outreach workers will give people living in encampments a week’s notice, then conduct daily outreach every day that week, attempting to get the homeless people into shelters or more permanent housing solutions, the mayor said. On the seventh day, Sanitation Department workers will clear people’s setups, kicking them out.
The NYPD is still involved in the sweeps and will accompany teams disassembling the encampments, a spokesman for the mayor confirmed.
Matt Rauschenbach, spokesman for the mayor, said the administration has been “laying the groundwork” for the new policy since the administration halted the sweeps in early January.
Mamdani said the outreach component made his approach distinct from the Adams administration’s. The mayor’s preliminary budget plan, unveiled Tuesday, added $6 million to hire an additional 60 outreach workers.
The mayor pointed to his administration’s success in making 1,400 shelter placements over three weeks of the cold spell as evidence the new sweeps policy could be more effective than under prior administrations. City data showed that the sweeps under ex-Mayor Eric Adams did not yield any permanent or supportive-housing referrals in more than a year, the news outlet The City reported in December.
“What is distinct about this approach is that outreach and connection to support services and shelter is the driving motivation throughout all of this,” Mamdani said at a Wednesday news conference. “So whereas previously, a homeless New Yorker might have only two points of interaction with city government, the first day they’re served a notice, and the seventh day when that notice comes to an end, our administration will meet those homeless New Yorkers every single day.”
HOMELESS
Luiz C. Ribeiro/for New York Daily News FILE – An NYPD officer, part of a team of sanitation, homeless outreach and police officers, watches as Department of Sanitation workers clean-up trash bags left by a homeless person at 9th St. and First Ave. in Manhattan on March 30, 2022. (Luiz C. Ribeiro for New York Daily News)
But social service advocacy groups voiced disappointment about the mayor’s move, which also came after his December vow to end the practice, calling it a “failure.”
“This is a big reversal and a big betrayal,” Helen Strom of the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project told the Daily News. “Some things from recent months were working and we were seeing them succeed in terms of opening up more low-barrier beds and single rooms, and being more flexible on meeting people where they were at. It’s really disappointing to see them now return to doing sweeps.”
Strom added that the offering outreach to homeless people with the threat of booting them and throwing their belongings out is counterproductive.
The Coalition for the Homeless and the Legal Aid Society called the new sweeps policy a “broken promise.”
“As the saying goes, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’ Returning to a failed approach will not produce different outcomes — it will only repeat the same mistakes,” the organizations said in a joint statement.
