NEW YORK (1010 WINS) — New York City Comptroller Brad Lander released a scathing evaluation of Mayor Eric Adams’ homeless encampment sweep program on Wednesday.
The audit, which primarily examined data from the program’s start in March 2022 to November 2022, found the sweeps rarely introduced homeless people into the shelter system, failed to place people in permanent housing and disrupted relationships with service providers and social workers.
The comptroller’s study echoed reporting by 1010 WINS in October 2022 in which homeless New Yorkers, social workers and politicians said the sweeps often separated homeless people from services and resulted in the destruction of property.
The sweeps are carried out by the NYPD, the Department of Sanitation, the Parks Department and the Department of Homeless Services. Lander’s audit focused on DHS and evaluated whether the agency met its stated goal for the sweeps of connecting homeless people with temporary housing, financial assistance and mental health support or its secondary goal of clearing temporary structures from public spaces.
Lander said that across nearly 200 sweeps of larger encampments and almost 2,000 sweeps of so-called “pop-up sites,” 2,308 people were displaced. This number is significantly larger than the mayor’s statistics released in September 2022, which claimed that, as of the end of August 2022, 1,442 people came in contact with DHS during sweeps.
Of the 2,308 people who were swept, Lander found 2,189 — about 95% — did not go to a shelter and received no services. Of the 119 people that did go to a shelter, 29 left on the same day they arrived. As of January 23, only 43 people placed after a sweep — about 2% — were still living in a shelter.
“The most significant evidence of the sweeps’ failure,” according to Lander, is the fact that only three people secured permanent housing after a sweep, meaning 99.9% remained homeless.
“The evidence is clear. By every measure, the homeless sweeps failed,” said Lander at a press conference Tuesday. “The sweeps not only failed utterly to meet their stated goals, they also damaged the trust that outreach workers rely on to build the relationships that will actually enable them to connect people to services and genuinely solve problems over time.”
The audit also found that the sweeps were not wholly effective in achieving the secondary goal of clearing structures from public spaces.
In a survey of 99 sweep locations on April 12, auditors found people had rebuilt some form of encampment at 31 of the sites. This sample doesn’t account for people who built encampments in other locations after getting swept.
“Despite the inherent difficulty of this work, our efforts have been indisputably successful,” said a spokesperson for the mayor in a statement. “In the first year of this initiative, New Yorkers experiencing unsheltered homelessness accepted services at six times the rate they did under the previous administration’s approach and a significant majority of cleanups have not resulted in an encampment being re-established.”
Adams’ office also criticized Lander for focusing on DHS, instead of carrying out an audit that considered the role of sanitation workers, parks staff and police.
The Department of Homeless Services referred 1010 WINS to the mayor’s office when asked for comment.
While the audit focused on data in the first nine months of the program, Adams’ sweeps are still being carried out, and the mayor has not made any indication he plans to end the program.
City Hall said that, as of the end of last month, 5,928 locations were swept, including repeats. The mayor also claims 181 people accepted placement in a homeless shelter, though he did not specify how many of them stayed in the shelter.
Lander recommended Adams end the sweeps immediately and offered policy recommendations as alternatives.
“End the sweeps. They’re counter productive. They harm the trust needed to build relationships and they failed utterly to connect people to services and shelter,” said Lander. “End them and replace them with high quality professional outreach that offers the services that people need and that provides access to low barrier housing.”
He recommended the city use a “housing first” approach as its primary tool for combatting homelessness.
Housing first policies prioritize providing people with permanent housing without first saddling them with conditions like employment or participation in programming.
Lander’s policy review found between 70% and 90% of housing first participants remained stably housed two to three years after receiving services compared to 30% to 50% in
“treatment first” or “housing ready” programs and 0.1% of those targeted by New York City’s sweeps.
New York City piloted a housing first program for homeless veterans in 2011 that reduced veteran homelessness by almost 90% — from 4,700 in 2011 to less than 500 in 2022, according to the comptroller.
Lander praised Adams for piloting a small housing first pilot program targeting 80 homeless single adults that has, as of April 25, already resulted in 23 leases and 58 people housed.
According to the policy review, supportive housing for an individual costs about $68 a day, compared to $136 per day for using a shelter, about $1,400 per day for being held at Rikers Island and $3,609 per day for a hospital stay.
The comptroller also recommended Adams continue to scale up the city’s safe haven program. Safe Havens generally are less restrictive of homeless people’s movement while offering more robust programming.
Lander again praised Adams for opening more safe haven beds.
“We also are glad to hear that the comptroller agrees with us on the importance of innovating to get more people housed faster, which is why our administration embraced the housing-first model last year and launched our ‘Street-to-Housing’ pilot. That one pilot alone has already placed nearly 80 New Yorkers experiencing homelessness directly from the street into an apartment,” said a spokesperson for Adams. “As a result of our robust shelter system and other efforts to help unhoused New Yorkers, New York City maintains a far lower rate of unsheltered homelessness than any other large city in the United States."
The mayor’s office estimated about 6% of homeless New Yorkers are unsheltered, compared to 57% in San Francisco and 70% in Los Angeles.
New York City’s shelter system is predicated on a groundbreaking 1979 lawsuit that established a “right to shelter” — an obligation for the city to provide a bed for anyone who asks for one in a timely manner. This Right to Shelter law is the basis of modern shelter systems and is often credited with New York City’s relatively low unsheltered homelessness rate.
Adams signed an executive order last month rolling back the portion of the Right to Shelter law that mandates the city provide a bed in a set timeframe, citing strains on the shelter system brought about by thousands of asylum seekers arriving in New York City.
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