Mayor Zohran Mamdani promised to end homeless encampment sweeps — but local officials are pushing his administration for what comes next and turning to social media to complain about encampments in their neighborhoods.

The missives are forcing an early test for Mamdani, who pitched a new way of approaching street homelessness ahead of his inauguration. He said he's focusing on permanently housing people rather than clearing them from sidewalks and public spaces only for them to return days, or even hours, later.

But since taking office Jan. 1, Mamdani has yet to articulate a more comprehensive plan, and many of the same City Hall staffers who presided over previous sweeps are still in top positions.

“The answer is not that someone should find the safest places outside,” Mamdani said Wednesday when asked about addressing street homelessness. “The answer is, how do we connect them with the services they need? And that's going to be the policies that we'll be putting forward.”

A City Hall spokesperson, asked for comment, referred Gothamist to Mamdani's previous statements on the issue.

Two city councilmembers this week said they've received complaints from businesses and residents about homeless people camped on the sidewalks, who likely would have been removed by police under former Mayor Eric Adams.

Earlier this week, Councilmember Erik Bottcher, who represents parts of Manhattan, said there was a “growing number of encampments” along 18th Street, near Sixth Avenue in the Flatiron District, in a post on X. Bottcher did not respond to requests for comment.

When Gothamist visited the area on Friday afternoon, four of the roughly dozen homeless New Yorkers who had been staying under the scaffold at the site were preparing to move into Safe Haven shelters, which have fewer restrictions than the city’s main shelter system, after outreach workers visited earlier in the day. Two police cars were parked across the street, but officers did not approach the group.

Jayson Oatman, a case manager from the organization Breaking Ground, which the city contracts for outreach work, was awaiting final approval to drive a man and woman to one of a limited number of shared units elsewhere in Manhattan.

“I've been hitting the street hard, trying to get them a bed because the storm is coming,” Oatman said.

He said the encampment in the Flatiron District began in October, and had been cleared multiple times to no effect. Critics of Adams’ encampment policies said people often lost their possessions during sweeps, were issued summonses by police and very often returned to the area because they had nowhere else to go.

“If they were sweeping right here, they’d take what they could take and move down the street,” Oatman said.

Jessica Morals, 32, one of the women staying on the West 18th Street sidewalk, said she was weighing the decision to remain in the cold or head indoors. But first, Morals said, she wanted to make sure she could stay together with her street “family” — an arrangement that may not be possible given the limited number of Safe Haven shelters in the city.

“When you see a group of people that are homeless together outside, that is their family, and people don't want to be separated from the family that they've made,” she said. “A lot of the reasons why they don't end up going to shelters or Safe Havens is because they get separated and they don't want to be separated from their family because they already lost their first one.”

Under Adams, city officials conducted more than 4,100 sweeps from January 2024 to June 2025, but none of the people driven from their locations were moved into permanent housing in that span. A Gothamist review of city data shows about 260 people agreed to move to a shelter.

Adams, business leaders and supporters of the crackdown said sweeps are necessary for ensuring public safety, addressing disorder and helping street homeless New Yorkers live with “dignity” by moving indoors. Critics of the policy, which began under Mayor Bill de Blasio and accelerated under Adams, say sweeps accomplish little aside from driving homeless New Yorkers to new locations. At one location in the East Village, city officials conducted 200 sweeps in the span of nearly two years, Gothamist previously reported.

Homelessness as a test

City officials say convincing people living on the street to accept shelter can take several attempts over many months and years. Some people refuse to go to a shelter because they’ve had a bad experience, while others have a mental illness and need additional resources.

But while the number of street homeless individuals living in New York City is a fraction of other U.S. cities, due in large part to the city’s unique right to shelter rules, it can have an outsize impact on public perception, and on mayors’ legacies.

Ben Holtzman, a professor at Lehman College wrote the book “The Long Crisis,” which details how the city has ceded authority to the private sector since the 1970s fiscal crisis.

“Homelessness and how we respond to it is a test,” Holtzman said. “From a historical perspective, it’s certainly the case that the ways that mayors are remembered in modern New York history is deeply affected by how they’ve responded to the incredible rise in homelessness over the last 50 or 60 years.”

He said mayors face “tremendous” pressure from businesses, the media and everyday New Yorkers to drive away the street homeless, but that strategy doesn’t yield lasting results without a comprehensive plan for housing and services.

“Visible poverty, people struggling with mental illness is not something people want to see on a daily basis,” he said. “But it does nothing to solve the crisis of affordability and very many other kinds of struggles that lead people to be on the streets.”

One underused tool is the city’s network of supportive housing sites, which feature on-site social services for formerly homeless residents. Roughly 5,000 of those apartments were vacant in June, according to city data.

Pascale Leone, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, said her organization’s members “are looking forward to working with the administration on solutions to ensure individuals can access safe, stable housing as quickly as possible.”

But many New Yorkers want action now.

Councilmember Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side, said since the sweeps stopped, “people are complaining to me like crazy.” But she said the city has been responsive and has sent outreach workers daily to try to convince people in four encampments to accept shelter beds.

She said the sites weren’t raising public safety concerns other than complaints about cardboard boxes and litter along the sidewalks. Brewer said she thought sweeps made no sense because people come right back to where they were.

“I do think a long-term clinical approach makes sense,” Brewer said. “It makes sense to have a long-term solution and I think that’s what they’re trying to do.”

This story was updated with additional comment.