Mamdani to stop all homeless encampment sweeps

Socialist New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has vowed to stop clearing out homeless encampments in the city, breaking policy with the Adams administration. The policy from Mamdani will go into effect in January when he takes office.

Mamdani confirmed that he would be stopping any sweeps of homeless encampments, which is one of the clearest breaks he has had from Adams, who established a policy in 2022 that saw to it that homeless encampments were taken off the streets.

"If you are not connecting homeless New Yorkers to the housing that they so desperately need, then you cannot deem anything you're doing to be a success," Mamdani said, per Fox News. Mamdani added that he would be focused on getting long-term solutions to housing, "whether it's supportive housing, whether it's rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is."

After Adams implemented the policy in 2022, an audit was conducted in 2023 by the NYC Comptroller Brad Lander. The report said that although the Adams administration did sweeps of homeless encampments, the initiative "completely failed" to get homeless people in New York City connected with services. There were 2,308 people in the homeless sweeps, only 119 of them accepted temporary housing in the policy program. One third of the encampments then saw homeless activity return.

In 2025 alone, there have been 45,000 complaints sent to city officials over homeless encampments in the city. Other left-wing policies that Mamdani has proposed, aside from ending any homeless encampment sweeps, include rent freezes in the city. Mamdani's policies that he proposed on the campaign also said that he wanted to tax "whiter neighborhoods more" in the Big Apple. However, when he was questioned about this during a press conference at the White House, he claimed that the policy was a "description of the neighborhoods and not a description of intent."

The policy in question said that he would "shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods."