An Adams administration task force trumpeted as the solution to the scourge of homeless encampments dotting the city has proven largely ineffective in moving vagrants into shelters, according to new data and critics.
From March 18, 2022, to April 30, 2023, just 166 people living in encampments — out of 3,408 “engagements” by the task force — were placed in shelters following sweeps.
That’s less than 5%, according to data provided by City Hall.
City Hall bragged that the task force increased shelter placement six-fold in its first year compared to the period before the initiative began — but critics and homeless outreach groups aren’t impressed.
“The business community, the homeless advocates, and even two-thirds of street homeless, they don’t want to have homeless people living on the streets of New York,” said civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, who helped establish a separate volunteer outreach program in July to place homeless individuals in shelters or hospitals.
“One would hope that with that kind of common ground [the city] could do better,” he continued.
David Giffen, who heads the Coalition for the Homeless, slammed the city’s sweeps as “a ridiculous waste of time and effort that solve nothing.”
“As we’ve always said, if you want people without homes to go somewhere else, give them someplace to go,” he said.
A notorious encampment on Columbus Avenue and West 76th Street is emblematic of the city’s toothless crackdowns.
Following last week’s report by The Post about a group of homeless individuals annexing half of the block in front of a building undergoing construction, city officials on Sunday cleared the area of their belongings and ordered them to leave.
Members of the group, however, returned hours later, frustrated residents said, and quickly began furnishing Columbus Avenue once again with their belongings, including navy couch cushions and a Friends-themed bedsheet — and set yellow caution tape to ward off their enemies.
“It’s amazing that our community seems helpless against these miscreants,” Joseph Bolanos, president of the West 76th Street Park Block Association, said, adding one of the vagrants, Ethan “Freckles” Schneider, has been setting up “encampments” around the neighborhood for years.
“Apparently, Mayor [Eric] Adams has lost to these individuals,” Bolanos added.
In Midtown, after the city cleared an encampment in front of a vacant storefront at West 54th Street and Broadway this week, its members simply pitched a new ramshackle dwelling one avenue over, with plans to return to their previous spot.
“There have been times I’ve ended up cycle through all my spots and I had to go back to the first one I started with because you got nowhere to go,” a vagrant named John, 33, said.
Many homeless said they’ve opted to continue sleeping on the streets after an encampment sweep versus entering the city’s shelter system because the facilities are plagued by violence and filth.
“It’s like being in jail,” Jose Medina, 43, said about his time living in a city-run shelter near Kings County Hospital Center. “I had a fight in the shelter, a person tried to rob me.”
An Adams spokesperson declined to comment on the criticism of the shelter-placement rate, instead pointing to previous statements by the mayor that the point of the initiative is to slowly build trust with the homeless and then get them to accept shelter placement.
City Hall did not provide a cost estimate of the task force’s sweeps.
A recent study by the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness found that across four cities in 2019, encampment sweeps cost roughly $3.3 million (for Houston) to $8.5 million (for San Jose).