New York City Mayor Eric Adams made clearing homeless encampments a top priority when he first took office at the start of 2022, but his administration has blown a deadline to disclose how many of those sweeps police and other city workers are conducting and at what cost to taxpayers.
The first mandatory report, due May 28, is now nearly four months late.
The report is required under legislation passed by the City Council last December. The measure is supposed to force the administration to provide quarterly updates on the location of encampments that have been removed, what agencies participate, the number of resulting arrests or involuntary hospitalizations, and the estimated price tag.
City Hall spokesperson Liz Garcia said the administration is “actively working on compiling this data” but there is no specific timeline for its release. Another City Hall spokesperson previously told Gothamist the law demands an “unprecedented and comprehensive compilation of data” that is taking a while to complete.
The bill’s sponsor, Councilmember Sandy Nurse of Brooklyn, said the Adams administration has now had plenty of time to gather the information.
“This lack of meaningful engagement with the legislative process, along with the continued delay in providing the required reports, raises questions as to your administration’s willingness to comply with the law,” Nurse wrote to the mayor in a letter requesting the sweeps data last month. “Clearing encampments of people who have no other options for shelter or housing is cruel and counter-productive.”
Police and sanitation workers have targeted certain sections of the city, including a 15-block stretch below the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, dozens of times in just a few months, after people returned following each sweep. In one high-profile encounter, city workers repeatedly attempted to clear a group of people staying in tents near Tompkins Square Park in the East Village, leading to multiple arrests in April 2022. At the time, one woman told Gothamist she chose to stay outdoors rather than enter a homeless shelter with no clear path to permanent housing.
Adams ramped up the street homeless enforcement efforts that began under his predecessor, Bill de Blasio, immediately after taking office at the start of 2022. The policy had the backing of the business community.
Enforcement peaked last summer and fall, when the NYPD, which makes the final determination on where to conduct sweeps, and employees from other city agencies carried out about 500 cleanups a month, according to data obtained by Gothamist and the group Safety Net Project through a Freedom of Information law request. City agencies conducted nearly 8,000 encampment sweeps between May 2022 and February 2024, the data shows.
Adolfo Abreu, housing campaigns director for the progressive policy organization VOCAL-NY, said Adams’ sweeps policy is more focused on moving homeless New Yorkers out of sight than in finding real solutions to the problem.
“We’ve been conditioned to think about homelessness by invisibilizing it, but it’s important for the public to see this,” said Abreu, whose organization signed Nurse’s letter. “A report showing the locations and the cost should force us to have a conversation about what services people are being connected to in terms of shelter and housing.”
Nurse said the crackdown hasn’t corresponded with sufficient housing options for New Yorkers who live on the streets. She said the reporting requirement is meant to examine whether driving homeless New Yorkers off the streets is getting people into shelters or permanent housing, and to put a price tag on the ongoing strategy.
Many New Yorkers bedding down in tents and make-shift shelters in public spaces simply move to other locations once city workers arrive and toss out their possessions, Nurse said, and they don’t end up seeking services or getting housed.
“Their goal is to repeatedly go to these places, bust them up and hope that people don’t come back because of the severity of the bust,” she told Gothamist. “It shows like we’re taking action, but the action is short-lived. It’s shallow. It doesn’t solve the issue.”
The city’s most recent street homelessness survey counted 4,140 New Yorkers staying in public spaces on a single night in January. That was a slight increase from the previous year, though experts say the count underestimates the true extent of unsheltered homelessness. The number may be rising as migrants staying in city-run shelters are forced to leave after 30 or 60 days under another policy enacted by the Adams administration.
Meanwhile, encampment sweeps are already emerging as a campaign issue ahead of next year’s Democratic primary race for mayor.
Comptroller Brad Lander, who is running for mayor, on Wednesday criticized the Adams administration’s approach to serving New Yorkers with severe mental illness who live in public spaces. Last year, Lander’s office issued a report recommending that the city end “the counterproductive sweeps targeting homeless New Yorkers with involuntary removal.” The report found just three of the more than 2,300 homeless New Yorkers removed during sweeps in 2022 ended up in permanent housing.
Lander last week said it is sometimes necessary to commit people experiencing a mental health crisis to a hospital, against their will. “But it will be necessary a lot less often if we have more safe-haven beds and more supportive housing,” he told members of the Association for a Better New York, a business and civic group, at a breakfast event.
As Gothamist previously reported, the city introduced a program in 2023 to speed up moves into permanent housing for some people staying on the streets and subways. More people are also moving into shelters intended for those coming off the streets, according to the latest mayor’s management report, an annual scorecard on agency performance.
New York City is experiencing a historic increase in homelessness, with more people staying in shelters than in past years, as rents rise and newly arrived migrants continue seeking temporary accommodations. At the same time, the city’s Department of Social Services is helping more of them move into permanent housing, according to the management report.
About 18,100 single adults and families with children moved out of city shelters and into housing during the fiscal year that ended on June 30, the report shows. That was up from about 14,400 the previous fiscal year.