NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — “They left a note, and said they were going to do a sweep. But unfortunately I had run to the bathroom, and when I came back everything was gone, including all my clothes, all my property. All my stuff was gone.”
Seamus is one of 1,442 people who have been displaced by over 2,400 homeless encampment sweeps that have taken place over the last six months, according to data from Mayor Eric Adams’ Office.
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Like many who have been targeted by Adams’ homeless encampment clearance program, sanitation workers and police destroyed Seamus’ belongings at a sweep near Tompkins Square Park — including a tent, a sleeping bag, clothes and personal hygiene supplies.
He has been living on the streets for 10 years and staying in shelters when the weather is bad.
Seamus says that, despite a decade of experience living without a home, city programs to criminalize homelessness have made it much more difficult to survive.
“It’s different because there’s so many sweeps going on,” he told 1010 WINS. “No matter where you go now the cops are getting so f*****g bad that even if you lie down somewhere, they’ll wake you up and say ‘You can’t lie down. Get up.’”
Since he was swept, he’s been moving around — usually sleeping exposed in parks or subways around Lower Manhattan. He said the instability has caused him to lose social service benefits like food stamps. It’s been difficult to maintain contact with social workers or receive mail while he’s constantly on the move.
Adams started his sweep program six months ago on March 18.
Teams of NYPD officers, Department of Sanitation workers and Department of Homeless Services social workers offer residents a ride to a shelter before destroying any belongings they can’t take with them. If they aren’t present when the sweep starts, everything will be destroyed.
The teams are supposed to hold on to certain items, like jewelry, medicine and electronics. Targeted residents can then exchange vouchers distributed at the sweep for their property.
Jaquelyn Simone, the Policy Director at Coalition for the Homeless, said that, as of Sept. 20, DHS had not contracted a vendor to store the vouchered belongings under new protocols that went into effect on Aug. 12.
“They’re putting the cart before the horse of doing very aggressive and repeated sweeps before they actually have the resources to ensure the sweeps are being carried out in a way that respects people’s personal property,” she told 1010 WINS.
The mayor’s office told 1010 WINS on Oct. 6 that the Department of Social Services, which DHS is a sub-agency of, is working with a vendor to provide storage units. The administration specified that the vendor is not contracted, and did not elaborate on what exactly the vendor’s relationship is with the city or when the agency started working with the vendor.
The teams are supposed to post notice 24 hours in advance, though the city is allowed to sweep with no notice if some broad criteria are met, including if structures are deemed “unsanitary” or if a city official of a high enough rank makes a request.
Partnership for New York City, an advocacy group made up of the CEOs of corporate giants like Pfizer, JP Morgan Chase, Paramount and more, supports the sweeps — describing homeless encampments as a “blight on the city.”
“Homeless encampments are unhealthy and dangerous for the unsheltered and a blight on the city," said Kathryn Wylde, president and ceo of the Partnership for New York City. "They are a manifestation of our society’s failure to deal humanely and effectively with people who are unable to care for themselves due to a combination of poverty, substance abuse, and mental and physical illness. Cities that have allowed them to exist are deteriorating and losing public confidence. Intervention is key for the individuals and for the community. We need many more supportive housing beds and mental health treatment facilities to provide an option, but the mayor is right to refuse to allow encampments to become acceptable in the city.”
Laura Sewell, the executive director of East Village Community Coalition, said that homelessness causes problems in the neighborhood, but she questions the efficacy of sweeps as a solution for homelessness in New York City.
“Of course it can be extremely challenging to share sidewalks and playgrounds with people living with addiction and mental illness,” she said. “There is still at least the same number of unhoused people living in the area, but the same people are not necessarily in the same locations. We see the occasional influx of people we don't recognize, as if they've been displaced from another location.”
Susan Stetzer, the district manager for Community Board 3, which covers the Lower East Side and Chinatown, said the sweeps have not been effective in her area either.
“Residents are divided. Some want to have homeless swept away, and others are appalled by this inhuman treatment and the long wait for safe haven beds for those who want to accept services," she said. "And that people’s possessions have been destroyed in clean ups. The encampment program has not resulted in less homeless people. Only beds can have people move off the street."
CB 3 passed a resolution in May calling on the City Council to hold an oversight hearing on the sweeps.
As of the end of August, the task force has reportedly swept 2,405 locations in which the teams contacted 1,442 people, indicating the same people were encountered multiple times.
The city identified 121 active camps at the end of August as well, though that figure is constantly changing as the task force carries out sweeps and the displaced residents set up in new locations.
One of the goals that DHS laid out for the program is to “assess and provide compassionate, resource-intensive outreach to help unsheltered people access social services such as temporary housing, financial assistance, or mental health and substance use assistance.”
Only 97 people have accepted placement into city shelters during 2,405 sweeps — that means, on average, one person accepts services every 25 sweeps.
Adams’ office does not interpret this statistic as a failure. The administration emphasized that, in the year preceding Adams’ sweeps, only “26 clients accepted placement.” The mayor’s office did not specify whether these placements took place during sweeps under former Mayor Bill de Blasio or a different outreach program.
“For months, outreach teams have engaged constantly with New Yorkers living on the streets to offer them a clean, safe place to rest and the dignity that comes with it," the mayor's office told 1010 WINS in a statement. "Mayor Adams has said since day one of this effort that we would do the work necessary to build trust and help people accept support, and that’s exactly what the administration is doing. The facts are clear that this administration’s approach is working.”
The mayor said the city intends to continue the sweeps for the foreseeable future.
Trinity Lower East Side Lutheran Parish on East 9th Street has been feeding homeless neighbors since the 60s and officially incorporated the Services and Food for the Homeless non-profit in 1986 that serves lunch daily, according to the organization's Executive Director Alex Lawrence.
Both Lawrence and the church’s pastor, Rev. William Kroeze, told 1010 WINS the sweeps have hurt the city’s ability to provide services.
“There were days when the police were parked outside our building to intimidate the people across the street, and then no one would come to lunch,” said Lawrence. “It affects their mind so much. They are so freaked out by getting either arrested or having their belongings taken away.”
Kroeze believes decades of earned trust between Trinity and the community it serves has made their programs successful, and that the sweeps are destroying the possibility for a similar relationship between the city and its homeless population.
“The most effective thing to do is to do the work and to spend the time building trust with the unhoused community and taking the time to hear from them what they need,” said the pastor. “Remember, our neighbors who are living on the streets have been repeatedly traumatized throughout their lives in many cases. And then to add the aggressive tactics that were added to the sweeps in many cases retraumatized people. It was probably highly triggering for people and added to the complication of trying to get people to accept help.”
If the goal is to convince homeless people to accept services, Lawrence said partnering with existing organizations like SAFH would be a good place to start. But the church never got that call.
“That level of trust, we have it with our community. But also, no one from the city ever reached out to us,” he said.
“The more effective way to get people off the streets is to partner with organizations like us who know the people, who have a relationship with them. And to not have it be such a highly militarized police activity, but to actually have that relationship building and that trust building through the organizations who know the people,” said Kroeze. “Because we definitely want to be partners with the city in helping people to thrive and to lead lives of dignity.”
The mayor’s office pointed out the city has launched a partnership with former New York Civil Liberties Union Director Norman Siegel and Coalition for the Homeless founder Robert Hayes to address street homelessness as well as city business leaders for a “Homeless Assistance Fund.”
Partnership for New York City, the advocacy group made up of some of the most powerful CEOs in the world that endorsed the sweep program, spearheaded the fund.
Contributors to the fund include Fox News Media & News Corporation, Pfizer and a bevy of banks and investors like Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and BlackRock.
According to the mayor’s press release, the intended use of the fund is to expand existing programs, including Adams’ subway safety plan.
The plan gave the NYPD a direct mandate to enforce rules against sleeping, stretching out and lying down on trains, Gothamist reported.
It also includes a ramp up in enforcement at the end of subway lines in order to kick sleeping homeless people off trains — a policy that Seamus told 1010 WINS often prevents him from getting a full night's sleep since his tent and sleeping bag were destroyed in a sweep.
Former Mayor Bill de Blasio lessened the NYPD’s role in sweeps in July 2020 — at the height of the protests against police violence that followed the murder of George Floyd.
“Police officers took a lead role in sweeps for years, but during the 2020 racial justice protests that followed the police murder of George Floyd, the city removed the NYPD from homeless outreach,” Coalition for the Homeless Policy Director Jaquelyn Simone told 1010 WINS.
Adams revived the NYPD’s role in sweeps from the start of his program in March, though the administration formally gave the NYPD “final determination regarding which sites will be assigned for cleanup” as part of DHS’ updated protocol in August.
“Under the Adams administration police are at virtually every sweep, and there is often a very large police presence,” said Simone. “We find that that can really escalate situations with people who are unsheltered. We know that homelessness is a housing issue. It’s not a crime to be without housing. And yet this administration has really taken a law enforcement lens when it comes to addressing unsheltered homelessness rather than connecting people to social services and permanent housing.”
The mayor’s office emphasized that the NYPD is not in charge of the sweep task force, which is spearheaded by Deputy Mayor for Operations Meera Joshi, and never was overseeing sweeps. Regardless, the new protocols give the police final say over which sites are targeted.
While the sweeps may have undercut the city’s ability to provide services for homeless New Yorkers by undermining trust, they also have made it more difficult for mutual aid groups, charities and neighbors to help, according to Simone.
“Sweeps can lead to displacement which makes it much harder for organizations like ours to create and maintain trust with a very hard to reach population,” she said. “Sometimes, we can’t even find people who have been displaced from one place to another… This really punitive criminalization of homelessness and the thousands of sweeps that Mayor Adams has initiated since he came into the office are really making it much harder for providers to maintain those trusting relationships with people on the streets and can actually push people further away from the services that can help them move indoors.”
Ace, a homeless man, told 1010 WINS everyone he used to live with started moving around after the encampment they shared was swept.
He had been living on the streets when he fell on train tracks and broke his leg in five places.
After doctors put metal rods in his leg and a steel plate in his ankle, he had trouble moving around, so he went to a shelter, where he was robbed and harassed.
“Those shelters are no good. They always say they’re so good, and they try to put your best interest, y’know? The reality is, when you go there, there’s a lot of favoritism if you’re new coming in and you have disabilities like I have,” said Ace. “There’s a lot of drugs and targeting as far as the staff, and they tend to ignore a lot of things if you try to make a complaint. So I ended up having to leave.”
Before the sweeps, he was sleeping on East Broadway near where he grew up.
There, he had a group of friends who would watch out for each other and share resources.
He also had relationships with local mutual aid and harm reduction groups that would give food and resources to the encampment.
That support network evaporated after the sweep.
“All I was doing was sleeping there,” he said. “They came with the Parks Department and the police, and they woke me up and took all my stuff and threw it away.”
He lost a sleeping bag and some other belongings when he was forced to leave with whatever he could carry.
Now he tries to go to a different place every night or sleep on the train.
Though he still prefers it to the shelters, where he says he lived in fear of the erratic behavior of others and was robbed, he now feels less safe on the streets without his community.
“You gotta worry about people ripping you off when you’re sleeping,” he said. “They say you're their friend, but given the chance if they know you have something on you sleeping, they’re going to come up, and they’re going to take something.”
The mutual aid groups are still helping out, but now homeless people need to seek them out since they’re not sleeping in the same place every night.
That’s fine by Ace. “Usually they tell you where they’ll be at and they come around in the park every day. They’re around and you can also go to their office too.”
But the volunteers running the mutual aid groups say their job has been made harder by the sweeps, and that they’ve lost contact with some people they used to support.
“When people are mobile like that, it's really hard to stay in touch with them, because folks on the street very often don’t have phones. They don’t have access to charge them. They don’t have the money to keep them on throughout the month, things get stolen — that sort of thing,” said Craig Hughes, a social worker for the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project. “The more mobile you make people, the harder it is to provide them services or help them get into housing.”
Eric, an organizer with the Rent Refusers Network who asked to use a pseudonym due to the organization’s confrontational relationship with police, said members have struggled to continue providing support in the wake of sweeps that leave encampment residents scattered around the city.
“There was just an encampment in Brooklyn… maybe two dozen people,” he said. “It was two big sweeps within three weeks. The first time we had replaced a lot of the stuff they lost. The second time those folks dispersed, and we haven’t been able to find them as an encampment again.”
“They can’t stay together as a group, because it brings too much attention — even though it was safer for them,” he continued. “They were able to share resources. They were able to not be alone, have each other’s company. Now they’re more individualized and just out there trying to survive by themselves.”
The actual process of carrying out sweeps varies depending on how big the encampment is, if activists or residents try to obstruct the sweep and how established the structures that are being cleared are.
That variability means the amount of resources dedicated to sweeps changes on a case to case basis, and the exact cost of the program may not even be known by the city.
An anonymous source told 1010 WINS the city doesn’t tabulate the cost of sweeps as it considers them part of the regular work of the agencies involved. Payroll and other costs from the NYPD, Sanitation Department, DHS and other agencies that can be situationally involved would therefore need to be compiled and calculated for an accurate estimate of the cost.
Sweeps are a highly visible use of resources, and the cost, though speculative, has drawn criticism from opponents.
“How much is this costing taxpayers? And how would that compare to giving someone access to permanent housing and subsidizing their rents?” asked Simone. “I think the sweeps are wrong because they are morally repugnant and they are pushing people away from services and are actually exacerbating the trauma of a very vulnerable population. But I think they’re also a massive waste of city resources. We should be investing in what would actually work to help people move off the streets. That means permanent affordable housing with support services as needed and low-barrier, single-occupancy shelters.”
Sewell said she also worries the sweeps are a misallocation of resources.
“Last spring's sweeps were brutal and traumatizing,” she said. “You couldn't help comparing the cost of the overwhelming show of force summoned against unhoused people who had next to nothing left to lose versus the cost of putting them up for a few months — especially after most of them reappeared on the street a few days later.”
Other programs attempting to get people off the streets are falling short too, which means when people are displaced by a sweep, options other than setting up camp again are limited.
CFTH recently found people are being turned away from shelters in violation of the city’s Right to Shelter law.
A Gothamist report in September found only 16% of people eligible for supportive housing, a type of housing that provides on-site social services like drug and mental health treatment, actually moved into a home last year.
With a faltering shelter system and insufficient social services, activists and homeless people are looking for alternative programs that could be funded to reduce street homelessness in New York City.
“If the mayor was really interested in solving street homelessness, he would center first and foremost housing as the resource that he offers people and not policing,” said Hughes.
Seamus, the homeless man who was swept near Tompkins Square Park, sees the solution in the more than 353,000 units that were vacant but unavailable in New York City in 2021.
“There’s so many empty apartments all over New York City,” he said. “You sleep in the city and you look at the buildings — half of the buildings are dark. Like there’s nobody living there. Half the f*****g buildings are empty.”
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