Mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism and questions from advocates for homeless New Yorkers after abruptly reversing his policy pledge to end homeless encampment sweeps.
City Hall officials said outreach workers with the Department of Homeless Services would begin notifying street homeless New Yorkers this week of plans to clear them out of public spaces. During a sweep, city sanitation workers often trash tents, makeshift encampments and other belongings if people refuse to pack up and go to a shelter or another location.
Mamdani had called the encampment sweeps done by his predecessors Eric Adams and Bill de Blasio a “failure” because they rarely led to people being placed in permanent housing. He billed the new plan as a kinder, gentler approach to addressing street homelessness, saying the city would conduct daily outreach in the seven days before police and sanitation workers arrived to disperse encampments or makeshift shelters.
But advocates for homeless New Yorkers say Mamdani’s plan is more of the same, and will displace people while moving only a fraction of them into shelters or permanent housing.
“It’s a huge step backwards,” said Josh Goldfein, a staff attorney for the Legal Aid Society. “It seems like what’s happening now is the administration is caving to political pressure to say they have to push people out with force rather than approaching them with resources that they need and will accept.”
Mamdani has faced pressure to resume sweeps from business leaders, elected officials and media outlets since he halted the policy days after taking office. Those calls intensified after at least 19 people died outdoors during a recent stretch of cold weather — though it was unclear how many of the people were living in encampments. At least five had permanent housing.
That's disappointing, is he at least making a real effort to house these people?
Allegedly,
Housing advocatea arent buying that though. This isn't being done because he's got brand new housing online, its being done because he's caving to local business leaders. From the paragraph before.
There's this problem with politicians where they believe they have to "represent" or hear out everyone of their constituents. NO, you don't! In fact, one of the first lessons you need to learn as an elected official is who to ignore, who to tell to fuck off, and who to actually listen to (the people who voted for you).
Republicans understand thus. Not sure why even the Mamdanis of the world can't figure this out.
It is impossible to please the haters. The best thing you can do is hold your values and positions and build a fanatical core of supporters. God imagine a Trump for the left!
I suspect this behavior is endemic to most politicians (people pleasers) and the secret is just making sure the the last person in the room is one of your own.
We're frankly just not going to have people comfortable telling haters to fuck off simply because we're not strong enough to back it up. Trump has millions of die hard supporters that he sort of fears. DSA has ~100k nationally.
This could have easily been the largest factor here. Apparently this winter in the northeast has been one of the colder, longer winters in a couple of decades. I suppose we'll see if this policy changes again when the weather improves.
But its not like the sweeps save anyone from freezing to death. Its just looking like he's doing something while making it worse. If he reverses come spring I would be extremely unsurprised.
it could if they actually had housing lined up...
tell the police not to remove squatters and let the unhoused people live in those vacant apartment buildings.
Fuck...