Mayor Adams says he’s ‘extremely pleased’ with subway homeless sweeps despite upwards of two-thirds leaving care

Mayor Adams said Thursday he’s “extremely pleased” with his administration’s homeless outreach efforts in the subway system — even though recently released data shows more than two-thirds of the people targeted by the sweeps gave up their shelter beds within a week.

The data, which was first reported by the Daily News this week, revealed that only 30% of homeless people who accepted a bed in a shelter between Feb. 21 and Aug. 28 after being approached by the administration’s outreach workers in the subways were still in the city’s care after a week.

In an unrelated press conference at City Hall on Thursday afternoon, Adams said that rate is a positive sign.

“One-third is no longer living on our (subways). You may not be old enough to remember the commercial — you can look at something half full or half empty — I look at it as a third of success,” the mayor said.

He also said “others were afraid to go into the subway system and say, ‘We’re going to engage you and get you service.’”

“A third of the people we went after have decided to stay in the system. I consider that to be a real thumbs up,” he continued, “and now let’s go after those two-thirds to find out what do we need to do … but I am extremely pleased.”

Previous mayoral administrations dispatched homeless outreach workers into the subway system via the so-called End of the Line initiative managed by the Department of Social Services with similar results.

Data compiled by the Coalition for the Homeless shows that the shelter retention rate as part of that initiative during the last two years of former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration was 25.6%, slightly lower than the rate achieved by Adams’ administration between February and August.

A key difference, though, is that Adams launched another homeless outreach initiative early in his administration called the Subway Safety Plan, which came with more funding as well as the addition of NYPD officers joining homeless outreach workers on the trains.

In August, he called that new initiative “a win” though he did not disclose the shelter retention data that has since been obtained by The News via a Freedom of Information Law request.

In his Thursday press conference, Adams argued against reading too much into the new data because “some of those two thirds” who left the shelter system within a week “may have decided: ‘I want to go and get employed.’”

Jacquelyn Simone, a policy director at the Coalition for the Homeless, slammed the mayor’s defense of the new data and called on him to pursue other policies to fight homelessness.

“Rather than spinning these paltry numbers as success, Mayor Adams should end these harmful, ineffective policies and instead expand access to the housing and private, low-barrier shelters that would help people move off the streets and stay off the streets,” Simone said.