New York City to crack down on homeless encampments

New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) said he plans to start clearing out homeless encampments in the city.

In an interview with The New York Times published on Friday, Adams said he was seeking to clear the encampments within a two-week period, but did not say when.

“We’re going to rid the encampments off our street and we’re going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services,” Adams told the Times.

Last month, Adams banned people from sleeping or sheltering in the subway system following attacks in the city’s stations.

Adams, who assumed office this year, said then most homeless people are not dangerous, but he didn’t want “fear to become reality.”

“We are not going to live in fear and frustration,” he said. “We have to dam every river if we are going to address this issue.”

The city had more than 2,300 unsheltered homeless people as of January 2021, according to the most recent annual point-in-time estimate.

The Times referred to a city webpage that defines an encampment as “a structure to live under,” including mattresses, tarps and tents, and noted that New York City does not have large homeless encampments like the tent cities seen on the West Coast, where hundreds of people live in a site.

This comes after Los Angeles banned camping in 54 locations in October and Portland, Ore., Mayor Ted Wheeler (D) used his emergency powers to ban camping on certain roadways last month, The Associated Press reported.

Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser (D) also launched a pilot program last summer to clear out homeless camps, the AP noted.

To clear out encampments in his city, Adams told the Times his administration would conduct an analysis “block-by-block” to identify the encampments before executing “a plan to give services to the people who are in the encampments, then to dismantle those encampments.”

“We can’t stop an individual from sleeping on the street based on law, and we’re not going to violate that law,” he told the newspaper. “But you can’t build a miniature house made out of cardboard on the streets. That’s inhumane.”