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Mayor Mamdani's Sweeping Retraction
As New Yorkers continued to die outside in the freezing temperatures, critics of the Mamdani administration began calling for the mayor to reinstate the practice of his predecessors, and start sweeping away homeless encampments.
There wasn't much logic to this demand—none of the 20 New Yorkers who died outside in the cold lived in these kinds of encampments. And in the past, the practice of destroying temporary structures and confiscating belongings of the city's chronically homeless population failed to actually get people into stable housing: A 2023 audit by the City Comptroller's office found that out of the 2,308 individuals cleared from encampments in 2022, only three of them found permanent housing.