Zohran Mamdani to stop all homeless encampment sweeps as NYC mayor, ending key Adams initiative
On Thursday, Mayor‑elect Zohran Mamdani announced that he would end the city’s practice of clearing homeless encampments—an initiative that the former mayor, Eric Adams, had pushed hard since taking office. He made the commitment during a separate press briefing in Manhattan, saying that all sweeps would halt once he’s sworn in at the start of the new year.
“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 told reporters. He criticized Adams’s policy, which critics say fails to move people from temporary camps into permanent homes.
The 34‑year‑old lawmaker made his position clear: “We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing.” He added, “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.”
Mamdani didn’t outline any concrete steps for addressing the complaints that have poured in about encampments across the city. According to 311 data, over 45,000 complaints were recorded for homeless camps in the first 11 months of 2025.
Adams had made sweeping the city’s tent cities a top priority when he assumed 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,” he declared in March 2022.
However, very few people who were displaced by those cleansings ended up in long‑term housing. An audit the following year found that roughly 95% of those who had been removed from camps were back on the streets shortly after the city dismantled them. City Hall disagreed with the Comptroller Brad Lander’s findings, calling the initiative “indisputably successful.” A spokesperson, Fabien Levy, said: “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.” He added that New York City still maintains the lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness among major U.S. cities.
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