Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani vowed Thursday to stop clearing homeless encampments throughout the Big Apple — ending a signature initiative pushed by the Adams administration since taking office.
The Democratic Socialist flatly told reporters at an unrelated press conference in Manhattan that he would stop all sweeps of makeshift settlements come the new year when he is sworn in as mayor.
“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,” Mamdani said of the Adams policy, which has faced criticism for not getting those homeless people into permanent homes after the sweeps.
“We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing,” Mamdani said.
“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.”
The young incoming mayor, though, offered up no specifics on how he planned to address scores of complaints about the homeless camps around the city.
According to 311 data, city officials received more than 45,000 complaints for encampments in the first 11 months of 2025.
Adams made clearing out tent cities a top priority after taking office in 2022.
“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,” Adams railed in March of 2022 when he kicked off the initiative.
But few of those caught up in the sweeps ever made it into permanent housing.
A scathing audit found the following year that roughly 95% of those homeless people were back on the streets shortly after city officials dismantled the camps.
City Hall disputed the report from City Comptroller Brad Lander, saying previously the initiative was “indisputably successful.”
“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,” City Hall spokesperson Fabien Levy said in a separate statement Thursday.
“New York City continues to have the lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness of any major city in the nation,” Levy said.
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