New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to stop clearing homeless encampments once he takes office in January.
The move is an initial indicator that Mamdani will be sticking to the true-blue leftism that he ran on, which favors performative compassion over any actual plans to improve the homeless situation.
Outgoing Democratic Mayor Eric Adams blasted Mamdani’s decision on social media. According to him, ending sweeps would create a “quality-of-life nightmare,” and “Leaving people to suffer in the cold isn’t just neglectful, it’s a disgrace.”
In his statement, Mamdani said that the goal of his administration would be to connect homeless people to any kind of housing that they need. Absent from his statement, as is typical for do-gooder liberal politicians, was any kind of acknowledgement of how difficult it is to keep drug-addicted and mentally-ill people in supportive housing, and how Mamdani would address that subset of the homeless population.
John Chell, a retired New York Police Department (NYPD) chief who was involved with Mayor Adams homeless policy, said that the vast majority of homeless people would reject being placed in a shelter. “If they didn’t want the help, they couldn’t set up an encampment next to a bank or someone’s business. They had to move.” Adams also attempted to expand involuntary treatment for mentally-ill homeless people, a move that leftist nonprofits like the Coalition for the Homeless predictably criticized as an infringement on ill-defined “rights.”
Mamdani’s decision would place New York City on an opposite trajectory from another major liberal city, San Francisco, which has favored a more aggressive approach to homelessness and crime in recent years. Previous Mayor London Breed launched homeless sweeps across the city after the Supreme Court overturned a lower court decision banning them, and they have continued under Mayor Daniel Lurie. Homeless encampment numbers spiked heavily in the city during the COVID-19 lockdowns, made more noticeable by remote workers’ desertion of downtown.
Perhaps Mamdani has an alternative homeless solution that will fix the problem without any punitive measures. The obvious answer, though, is that his proposal matches his campaign: a feel-good approach that solves nothing and makes life worse for everyone involved.
