Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism and questions from advocates for homeless New Yorkers after abruptly reversing his policy pledge to end homeless encampment sweeps.
City Hall officials said outreach workers with the Department of Homeless Services would begin notifying street homeless New Yorkers this week of plans to clear them out of public spaces. During a sweep, city sanitation workers often trash tents, makeshift encampments and other belongings if people refuse to pack up and go to a shelter or another location.
Mamdani had called the encampment sweeps done by his predecessors Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio a “failure” because they rarely led to people being placed in permanent housing. He billed the new plan as a kinder, gentler approach to addressing street homelessness, saying the city would conduct daily outreach in the seven days before police and sanitation workers arrived to disperse encampments or makeshift shelters.
But advocates for homeless New Yorkers say Mamdani’s plan is more of the same, and will displace people while moving only a fraction of them into shelters or permanent housing.
“It’s a huge step backwards,” said Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society. “It seems like what’s happening now is the administration is caving to political pressure to say they have to push people out with force rather than approaching them with resources that they need and will accept.”
Mamdani has faced pressure to resume sweeps from business leaders, elected officials and media outlets since he halted the policy days after taking office. Those calls intensified after at least 19 people died outdoors during a recent stretch of cold weather — though it was unclear how many of the people were living in encampments. At least five had permanent housing.
crosspost from https://hexbear.net/post/7702840
Oh no! He’s telling some homeless folks they can’t permanently live in a public space and build your own house there. He’s offering outreach and services every day for the next seven days before they have to leave… oh the travesty!!!
You should be forced to live in a dog cage
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As someone who used to be homeless and walk 1 mile up into the woods most nights unless I was couch surfing… I’m down.
We need Medicare for all, the homeless you see on the street need services and a place to live. Lots of untreated mental disabilities and trauma. So many issues in their lives. They need some fucking help.
There are millions of homeless people who you probably see every day that you don’t even know are homeless… these are not those people.
Letting them live on a cardboard box in front of the convenient store is not a solution bro.
Edit: just to be clear, just because I have experienced some aspects of being homeless does not make me an expert on the subject. But I have definitely seen some crazy ass shit. And I was more of a traveling hippy than a local homeless person with mental illness and drug addiction. But… that said, I had zero safety net, and getting out of homelessness was one of the most difficult, if not the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. And I wasn’t able to do it by myself. I have a bit of disdain when I see these programs that let homeless people work for low wages. It’s a joke. Even housed people who work low wages can’t afford to move into a new place, let alone when you are starting off with just what you have in your pack, or your grocery cart or whatever…. And folks who actually have grocery carts are either mentally ill or very eccentric, fyi.
I’m not disagreeing because I want them to live in cardboard boxes, but because I don’t believe homeless sweeps are ever done with the goal of finding a home for these people. Instead they are done to terrorize them and keep them on the run so that poverty is not clear and transparent for everyone to see, while doing absolutely nothing to actually house them.
I doubt there would be a need for those sweeps if there really was a viable alternative provided by the state.
I hear you there for sure… i don’t know what the situation was like before though. Is this an improvement at all?
We are so conditioned to believe that being poor is our own fault and the being wealthy somehow means you’re a hard worker… which is 100% false. The opposite is closer to reality.