Zohran Mamdani vows to end homeless encampment sweeps as NYC mayor, ending key Eric Adams initiative

NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK: Incoming mayor Zohran Mamdani isn’t waiting until Inauguration Day to make headlines. During an unusually blunt moment at a Manhattan press event this week, he made it clear he plans to chart a very different course from Eric Adams, especially when it comes to the city’s most vulnerable residents.

And now, a claim circulating widely online says Mamdani will completely end all homeless encampment sweeps once he takes office on January 1.

Zohran Mamdani says encampment sweeps ‘cannot be deemed a success’ without real housing solutions

Mamdani, a Democratic Socialist and one of the city’s most-watched new political figures, didn’t mince words when asked about the future of Adams’ controversial sweeps.

“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,” he said, directly criticizing the previous administration’s approach.

The mayor-elect said he’ll shut down all sweeps of makeshift encampments, a program Adams has treated as one of his administration’s key public-order achievements since launching it in 2022. 

Instead, Mamdani emphasized that the city’s mission should be simple: “We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing … whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is.”

He added that homelessness should never be accepted as an inevitable feature of city life: “What we have seen is the treatment of homelessness as if it is a natural part of living in this city, when in fact, it’s more often a reflection of a political choice being made.”

Still, he offered no detailed blueprint on how the city will respond to the thousands of quality-of-life complaints New Yorkers file every year.

Eric Adams made sweeps a signature initiative despite few people landing permanent housing

Since 2022, clearing tent clusters, whether under highways, near schools, or inside parks, has been a hallmark of the Adams administration.

“We cannot tolerate these makeshift, unsafe houses … this is just not acceptable, and it’s something I’m just not going to allow to happen,” Adams said when launching the initiative. But audits revealed a glaring issue: even after encampments were dismantled, about 95% of the people involved ended up back on the streets.

Critics argued that the sweeps created more displacement than stability. City Hall pushed back, saying detractors were cherry-picking data.

“These cleanups have actually connected more than 500 New Yorkers to safe, stable housing,” spokesperson Fabien Levy insisted, adding that New York still has the lowest rate of unsheltered homelessness among major US cities.

Still, from January to November 2025 alone, 311 received more than 45,000 encampment-related complaints, underscoring the scale of the issue Mamdani will inherit.