New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the city will restart clearing makeshift homeless encampments, a policy that his administration had suspended shortly after he took office in January. Mamdani said he previously criticized the earlier approach because it did not do enough to move people into housing, and he outlined a different method that he said would be more effective.
Mamdani said the renewed sweeps would rely on homeless services outreach rather than police-led enforcement. Speaking Wednesday at an unrelated news conference, he said the city would “meet them looking to connect them with shelter, looking to them with services, looking to connect them with a city that wants them to be sheltered and indoors and warm and safe,” adding that he believed the new approach would “yield far better results.”
The decision arrives as at least 19 people have died outside over several days of brutal cold in New York City, according to the mayor’s office. The office said there was no evidence that the people who died had been living in encampments, and it pointed to an “aggressive campaign” to coax homeless people into shelters, heated buses and warming centers.
Under the approach the mayor’s office described, the city would first post a notice that an encampment would be cleared and then send outreach workers from the homeless services department there every day for a week. On the seventh day, city sanitation workers would dismantle the encampment with the expectation that people had left the area; police officers would be present as observers, a spokesperson said.
Mamdani’s new plan contrasts with the policy his predecessor, Eric Adams, promoted soon after he took office. Adams’s sweeps were led by police and sanitation crews and became a centerpiece of efforts to “restore order” in the city, according to the AP account, drawing protests from homeless advocacy groups and producing mixed results. The record cited said most encampment sites were not re-established, but only a fraction of those targeted accepted temporary shelter.
David Giffen, executive director of Coalition for the Homeless, said his organization was “blindsided” by the announcement and criticized it as “a political response” that would do little to help homeless New Yorkers. Giffen said the plan would fray trust between outreach workers and unsheltered residents, potentially leading to more deaths during the next extreme weather event, arguing that when city workers remove belongings, residents may be less likely to seek assistance later.
City Council Speaker Julie Menin, also a Democrat, said Mamdani’s announcement represented progress. In a statement, she said, “Allowing New Yorkers to stay on the street during extreme weather is inhumane,” and said that after oversight hearings at the Council, it was “clear that the City needed to take a closer look at how this policy was being implemented.” Menin added that “Protecting lives must remain our top priority.”