Mayor Asks Homeless To Trust Him As City Clears 240 Encampments

NEW YORK, NY — Mayor Eric Adams celebrated the end of a two-week blitz of encampment tear-downs by releasing disturbing images from inside the camps — then insisting homeless people would come to trust him.

"We are rebuilding trust in this city," Adams said at a Wednesday press conference, contending new brochures and repeated visits with homeless New Yorkers will increase their trust with the city. "People don’t want to live on the street — they believe they don’t have any options."

Adams presented the controversial clean-up plan as a means to provide better housing for homeless New Yorkers, but said only five people accepted help during the first week of the blitz, which ultimately saw 239 encampments cleared.

And the images released by City Hall — which show abandoned needles scattered across a blanket floor and a mass of blankets and a wooden platform claiming a parking spot — suggested a darker narrative.

"I'm supposed to allow this to stay?" Adams asked, pointing to a photo of drug paraphernalia found in the Meeker Avenue encampment. "I'm supposed to act like I don't see this?"

Under the plan, teams of cops, sanitation workers and social service employees cleared encampments after giving 24 hours notice to those living there, officials said.

The crews cleared nearly all of the 244 encampments identified thus far by the city, and reported back on what they found.

According to the city, findings included 537 used needles across four encampments on the Williamsburg corridor.

"This is dignity? This is how we treat fellow New Yorkers?" Adams asked. "They need help and assistance [to] rebuild their lives."

Homeless advocates and former encampment owners argue the initiative — as well as the plan to remove homeless New Yorkers from the city's subways — prioritizes optics over assistance.

"Let us be very clear: what is happening this week are systematic evictions," the Brooklyn Eviction Defense said in a statement. "[It's] dispossessing our neighbors and community-members of their ways of life, and stealing from them their means of shelter."

This characterization aligns with what Heriberto Medina — who recently watched a city garbage truck suck up the tent he set up under the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway — told Gothamist this week.

“They always target the homeless,” Medina said. “Instead of helping us, they kick us while we’re already down.”

The mayor maintains shelters are the safest place for unhoused New Yorkers and noted Wednesday he has promised to add 500 new beds to shelters, including at preferred "Safe Haven" sites like one opened in The Bronx this week.

Adams' administration has been making unannounced visits to check on conditions at existing city shelters and has armed clean-up teams with brochures showing options for those living in encampments, the mayor added.

The mayor argued his Subway Safety Plan as proof that homeless New Yorkers would come to accept help over time given that more than 300 had done so, compared to 22 who accepted help in the first week of the subway plan.

That number still represents a minuscule portion of the 18,200 interactions the teams have had with people since being deployed to the subways. The teams engaged with an average of 650 people in need each night in the 28-day period, though the mayor's office has noted that not all people included in the data are experiencing homelessness.

"They have in their heads what this shelter system ... looks like," Adams said. "We want to show them what it looks like to have wrap-around services."

But encampment owner Parker Wolf, 22, told Gothamist shelter living was not an option for him because it would mean separating from his boyfriend of nearly two years.

Said Wolf to Gothamist, “Making us move doesn’t make less homeless people.”