Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani says City Hall will abandon the homeless encampment sweeps that defined the Adams administration, promising a fundamental reset in how New York responds to people living on the streets.
Speaking at an unrelated press briefing in Manhattan on Thursday, the incoming mayor stated plainly that the clear-outs will stop once he takes office in January. For him, the current approach has failed because it removes tents but does not move people into real housing.
“If you are not connecting unhoused New Yorkers to the homes they urgently need, then nothing about this policy can be called successful,” Mamdani said, arguing that the city must stop treating homelessness as an unavoidable fixture of urban life instead of the outcome of political choices.
He said his administration will prioritize linking people in encampments to housing of every kind, from supportive units to rentals, stressing that sheltering people must take precedence over chasing them from one block to another.
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Mamdani, who is 34, offered no immediate blueprint for managing the thousands of complaints that come in every year regarding tent clusters across the city. According to 311 data, more than 45,000 such complaints were filed in the first eleven months of 2025 alone.
The sweeps became a signature policy for Mayor Eric Adams shortly after he entered office in 2022. At the time, Adams condemned makeshift shelters sprouting in parks, underpasses, and near schools, insisting the city could not tolerate what he described as unsafe, improvised dwellings.
However, a blistering audit by Comptroller Brad Lander found that roughly 95 percent of the people displaced during the operations returned to the streets shortly after the encampments were dismantled. Only a small fraction secured permanent housing.
City Hall has long rejected that assessment. Spokesperson Fabien Levy reiterated Thursday that the cleanup operations have connected more than 500 individuals to stable housing and insisted that New York maintains the lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness among major US cities.