NYC homeless camp sweeps failed, says of Mayor Adams’ policy

A city comptroller audit says Mayor Adams’ controversial sweeps of homeless encampments “completely failed” and led to just three homeless people getting permanent housing.

Between March and November of 2022, the “forcible” removal of 2,308 homeless people resulted in only 90 of them staying in a homeless shelter for more than a day, City Comptroller Brad Lander said in the audit released Wednesday.

“The data is clear: The sweeps failed,” Lander said during a press conference in the East Village. “Here’s what for me is the most significant of the sweeps’ failure: Only three secured permanent housing. 99.9% of them remained homeless.”

City officials pushed back on the report’s findings, saying it ignored the fact that people living on the streets are likely to need more services and support than traditional permanent housing.

Administration officials also pointed out that the proportion of homeless people living on the streets in New York City stands at approximately 6% — far lower than in cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles, where those proportions are 57% and 70%, respectively.

When Adams first announced the sweeps Feb. 2022, he attempted to frame the policy in terms of both compassion and common sense, saying that subways couldn’t continue to be viewed as being in disarray and that homeless people shouldn’t be allowed to live in squalid conditions.

But the policy almost immediately drew pushback from progressive lawmakers and homeless advocates who said prior attempts to carry out such measures had failed in the past.

Lander suggested Wednesday the critics were right and said the sweeps have ultimately been “counterproductive.” He also called on Adams to end them and floated an alternative “Housing First” model that prioritizes providing permanent housing and eliminating hurdles to securing it.

“With a Housing First approach to street homelessness, combined with upholding the right-to-shelter, New York City could dramatically reduce street homelessness,” Lander said. “The city that never sleeps should aspire to have no one sleep on the street.”

The right to shelter law that Lander alluded to is something Adams set out to narrow recently when his administration implored a judge to weigh in on the matter in light of the more than 75,000 migrants who’ve come to the city, many in need of shelter, in the last year.

Adams and Lander have not been on good terms in general of late. Early this month, the mayor openly mocked the comptroller and labeled Lander the “loudest person in the city.”

In keeping with that, Adams’ spokesman Fabien Levy said in a sarcasm-laden statement that the administration is “glad to hear that the comptroller agrees with us on the importance of innovating to get more people housed faster, which is why our administration embraced the housing-first model last year and launched our ‘Street-to-Housing’ pilot.”

Levy also defended the administration’s policy of clearing homeless encampments, but appeared to measure success differently than Lander.

“Our efforts have been indisputably successful,” he said. “In the first year of this initiative, New Yorkers experiencing unsheltered homelessness accepted services at six times the rate they did under the previous administration’s approach and a significant majority of cleanups have not resulted in an encampment being re-established.”