Mayor Adams’ homeless encampment sweeps reached new high last fall

As Mayor Eric Adams doubles down on increasing police visibility to combat what he calls a perception of lawlessness in the city, his administration continued to ratchet up police-involved sweeps of homeless encampments last year, new data analyzed by Gothamist shows.

The number of times NYPD and city employees were deployed to clear encampments under Adams peaked starting in August, with the city conducting an average of 500 sweeps every month through the fall, records obtained by Gothamist and the Safety Net Project through a Freedom of Information law request show. Police were present at nearly all of the nearly 8,000 encampment sweeps that took place from May 2022 through this February.

One street in the East Village was swept 199 times and city officials visited a Midtown site outside a mosque 192 times, records show. Both sites were also operating as street vending locations, neighbors said.

The previously unreported data shows how the mayor remains undeterred in his strategy to combat street homelessness. Left-leaning elected officials and nonprofit providers have called the encampment sweep policy ineffective and said it was too focused on ridding homeless people from the public eye rather than making meaningful policy changes. Homeless advocates are also concerned street homelessness will swell this summer following a court settlement in March that will allow the city to deny migrant adults shelter after 30 or 60 days.

“Despite the inherent difficulty of this work, these unprecedented investments are working. We’re connecting over 3.5 times more unsheltered New Yorkers to shelter compared to the previous administration,” said William Fowler, a City Hall spokesperson. “New York City maintains a far lower rate of unsheltered homelessness than any other large city in the United States.”

Fowler said the city had also increased the number of shelter beds that have lower barriers to entry, and put twice as many people from these beds into permanent housing. He added that more than 98% of clean-ups were “successful” and were not re-established.

A sweep involves officials from several agencies responding to a complaint or a referral from another department to clear any physical structures in public spaces such as tents, cardboard boxes or encampments and offer services to homeless people on site. In a few cases, it can result in an arrest or summons.

The Department of Sanitation data reviewed by Gothamist includes a log of each sweep, including when and where the sweep took place, whether police or social services staff were present, and whether a site was cleaned or no conditions were found.

Councilmember Sandy Nurse, who co-sponsored a law last year requiring the Adams administration to disclose how much it costs taxpayers to clear homeless people from public spaces, said she doesn’t think more encampment sweeps will result in long-term solutions.

“I think we’re going to see an alarming amount of resources going into just literally sweeping homelessness under the rug,” Nurse said.

The first report detailing the costs of the encampment sweeps and how many people received permanent housing or shelter as a result of Adams’ policy is due next month.

Natalie Druce, a staff attorney for the Safety Net Project, said recurring sweeps at the same location are indicative that Adams’ strategy has become focused on enforcement and policing.

“Folks are pushed out of the subway system back onto the street, where they’re swept again, and it’s just kind of this vicious cycle of criminalization all of which are designed to kind of penalize homeless folks for their existence in public spaces,” Druce said.

Druce said the sweeps — which often result in officials discarding people’s belongings — do more harm than good and can be traumatizing for homeless people, setting them back from the path toward housing.

“When we don’t have housing and when our shelters are at capacity, people have nowhere to go. And instead of working and pushing our resources into building more housing and more housing solutions, we are putting an enormous amount of resources into daily sweeps that are just pushing people along and not actually getting them into housing,” Nurse said.

The little you have gets tossed

Business owners and employees around the commercial corridor near the L train station in the East Village that’s been subject to nearly 200 sweeps say that the area is largely used as an open-air market.

The impromptu vending results in people blocking the sidewalks for customers of brick-and-mortar stores and oftentimes leaving behind piles of trash. Some people sleep there, too.

But store owners say the cops come frequently and sometimes park on the street. Local smoothie shop owner Jimmy John said people have stopped gathering over the last few months.

“They need to make a living, I know that. But you need a certain rule and a certain place, right? And you need to respect the local business,” John said.

Councilmember Carlina Rivera, who represents the area, said she’s received several complaints from constituents flagging fights, illegal vending or people in need of mental health support. But she said there needs to be a more humane and long-term way to deal with the issue.

“The administration was really holding on to a strategy that just provided temporary visible relief; you are moving people from one location to another,” she said, adding that the sweeps are a misappropriation of resources. “Those very few housing placements that have come as a result is a testament to how this tactic by the city is not quite working.”

Rivera’s office partnered with Bellevue Hospital and other groups to conduct outreach and build relationships with individuals and get them services.

A report by the city’s comptroller’s office last June found only three New Yorkers received permanent housing from sweeps in 2022. City officials said 290 people have been placed in shelter in the two years of sweeps under Adams, compared to 80 placements during the last two years of the de Blasio administration.

Still, the city ramped up sweeps late last summer, which was when the highest number of sweeps were conducted during the period that Gothamist examined. It conducted 534 in August, 471 in September and 513 in October, data shows. The number of sweeps dropped to an average of 300 a month in the winter. About a third of the encampment sites that were cleared were visited more than 10 times.

City officials said most sites only require a handful of visits but there are outlier locations that need more attention due to other quality of life concerns. No encampments are found in over a third of the sweeps. But Druce said sweeps generally increase during major events like the New York City Marathon, which took place in November, or the U.N. General Assembly, which took place in September.

Eduardo Ventura, 37, said he’s experienced dozens of sweeps in various locations, including one street in the East Village that was cleared out 22 times.

“Imagine you don’t have nothing and they throw in the little stuff that you get,” he said. “Instead of giving us a step forward, it’s going backwards. We already know that the system don’t work. They know that for years.”

Ventura said he lost his passport and driver’s license in the sweeps and blankets and supplies people donated to him were also tossed. He finally decided to accept a Safe Haven placement last December, but said he’s not hopeful he’ll be able to get permanent housing, he’s already lived in the shelter system for years and hasn’t been able to get an apartment.

“If we just do the same thing we’re doing for generations and years and decades, we’re never going to fix nothing,” he said.

‘Temporary visible relief’

Prior mayors have also tried to rid the city of encampments, including Bill de Blasio. Sweeps skyrocketed under de Blasio’s administration to about 150 a week in the last six months of 2021, a higher rate than under the current administration. But Adams put a special focus on street cleanups, pitched an interagency collaboration to get people off the streets and connected with services, and tasked the NYPD with making the final call on which sites are targeted.

“Let’s be clear here. You have a right to sleep on the street. You don’t have the right to build a miniature house. That’s the difference,” Adams said in March 2022 when announcing his revamped cleanup strategy involving the NYPD and the city’s sanitation, parks and homeless services departments.

“This is about building trust. And even if they say, ‘We don’t want to go inside,’ we’re going to continue to build the trust. And eventually we’re going to convince them to go inside,” Adams said at the time.

DHS officials said a variety of services are offered during the sweeps, including shelter beds, placement in Safe Haven sites — which have fewer requirements than shelters — or drop-in centers and that it can take several outreach attempts to build trust among those resistant to stay in shelters.

The Adams administration previously said it increased the number of low-barrier beds by 300 since last fall and moved 1,000 people from these beds into permanent housing last fiscal year. Officials said sites are selected based on reports by city agencies, including street outreach teams and 311 calls.

NYPD said its officers have issued 31 arrests and 37 summonses since the task force was created two years ago. More than half the sweeps involved a partial or full cleaning, the records show, with some sweeps lasting as long as 4 hours and 50 minutes and others just a minute long.

“It can be really, really traumatizing for someone to get woken up in the early hours of the morning, told to just take what they can carry and go, and then just have to watch while the city disposes of all of their worldly belongings,” Druce said.