Newsman: New York City officials are planning to remove makeshift shelters set up by homeless people on city streets. Mayor Eric Adams disclosed the initiative in an interview with The New York Times on Friday, but with few details. Many liberal metropolises took similar efforts that had previously tolerated the encampments. Cities across the country including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., have been removing encampments and taking other steps to address homelessness that would have been unheard of years ago.
Mayor Eric Adams announced a push to remove homeless people a month earlier in response to assaults and other aggressive behavior that affecting city’s sprawling subway system.
“We’re going to rid the encampments off our street and we’re going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services,” he told the Times. “I’m telling my city agencies to do an analysis block by block, district by district, identify where the encampments are, then execute a plan to give services to the people who are in the encampments, then to dismantle those encampments.”
But Eric Adams acknowledged that officials cannot force anyone to go to a homeless shelter. And he did not say where people living in the encampments would go as He expected the effort to begin within two weeks.
“We can’t stop an individual from sleeping on the street based on law, and we’re not going to violate that law,” he said. “But you can’t build a miniature house made out of cardboard on the streets. That’s inhumane.”
New York City’s most recent estimate in January 2021 said roughly 50,000 homeless people in the city stay in shelters and about 1,100 people were living in parks and on the streets — the number seen by many advocates as an undercount.
