A man walks with a backpack at a homeless camp. © August 9, 2022 REUTERS/ Jesse Winter
(New York, NY) – Mayor Eric Adams is on his way out. It will soon be mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s job down at City Hall. And one of Adams’ key initiatives appears to be ending soon — as the mayor’s “homeless camp” sweeps are to be discontinued by Mamdani.
This week, Mamdani announced his intention to immediately end the Adams’ administration policy of clearing out homeless encampments across the city. So when he’s sworn in on January 1, 2026 — those sweeps are over. Mamdani says the sweeps are a failure because they fail to connect homeless people to permanent housing. The mayor-elect says rather than sweeps and removal of camps — he plans to focus on building new housing.
Mamdani said it this way: “If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you’re doing to be a success. We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing. Whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is, because what we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact, it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made.”
It was in March of 2022 when Adams kicked off his homeless camp sweeps. At that time, Adams said: “We cannot tolerate these makeshift, unsafe houses on the side of highways, in trees, in front of schools, in parks. This is just not acceptable, and it’s something I’m just not going to allow to happen.” And most New Yorkers would agree homeless encampments are a problem. They’re an eye sore and dangerous. Often riddled with drug use and the inherent threat of violence, it’s also simply not befitting of a major, modern metropolis such as New York City.
Lesser cities have been destroyed by such encampments, including Portland, Oregon in the uber-progressive Pacific Northwest. This week, Adams’ spokseman Fabien Levy defended Adams’ homeless encampment sweeps. “Cherry-picking numbers and sharing them out of context paint a disingenuous picture as these cleanups have actually connected more than 500 New Yorkers to safe, stable housing. New York City continues to have the lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness of any major city in the nation.”
During the first 11 months of 2025, the city received 45,000 homeless encampment complaint calls via 311. And in 2023, an audit found that 95% of people displaced by sweeps return to the streets — not long afterward. Mamdani has not detailed a concrete plan in terms of how his administration will respond to homeless encampment complaints.
