Mayor Zohran Mamdani is bringing back the very homeless encampment sweeps he campaigned on ending, a reversal forced by 19 deaths during a brutal cold stretch and more than 3,300 encampment complaints flooding the city's 311 system so far this year.
The sweeps are expected to restart as soon as Wednesday, with the Department of Homeless Services taking the lead on issuing notices. Cops and sanitation workers will still be on hand. The new process involves outreach workers visiting encampments repeatedly over seven days before the Department of Sanitation moves in to clear the site.
If that sounds familiar, it should. The approach mirrors what the city did under former Mayor Eric Adams.
Mamdani made ending encampment sweeps a centerpiece of his pre-office rhetoric, according to the New York Post. Back in December, he told reporters the practice was a failure that resulted in only a few people being placed into city shelters. When he took office on January 1, he moved fast: ordering DSNY and NYPD to leave encampments alone and not to touch anything resembling personal property nearby.
Then reality showed up.
Nineteen people died outside during the cold. Complaints poured in from every borough. City Council Speaker Julie Menin hauled the administration before a hearing last week and delivered a line that cut through the bureaucratic hedging:
"These New Yorkers should be alive today."
That's not a Republican talking. That's the City Council Speaker, a fellow Democrat, publicly holding Mamdani's feet to the fire over a policy that was supposed to be more compassionate than what came before it.
City Hall spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach framed the reversal the way spokespeople always do: not as a retreat, but as an evolution.
"When Mayor Mamdani took office, he paused the failed encampment sweep policies of the past, making clear that the city would no longer rely on approaches that simply moved people from block to block without real support."
Rauschenbach also described the new timeline as a feature, not a concession:
"The goal is to maximize placements into shelter and connect unhoused New Yorkers to the services they need so that when DSNY clears an encampment on day seven, meaningful progress has already been made."
Translation: we're doing the same thing the last mayor did, but we'd like credit for adding a week-long preamble. Mamdani's new budget does include 60 additional outreach workers, which is the administration's way of dressing the reversal in new clothes.
This is what happens when progressive governance collides with the unglamorous demands of running a city. The cycle is remarkably consistent:
An unnamed insider quoted in the reporting put it plainly:
"The fact they keep rolling back campaign promises shows they spent the summer only saying whatever made political sense."
That's not a conservative critique from the outside. That's coming from someone close enough to the operation to know how the sausage gets made. And what they're describing isn't a policy adjustment. It's the gap between what progressives say to win elections and what governing actually requires.
The fundamental problem with Mamdani's original approach wasn't administrative. It was philosophical. He treated encampment sweeps as inherently cruel, a system designed to harass the vulnerable. What he didn't reckon with is that leaving people in makeshift camps during a New York winter isn't mercy. It's abandonment with better PR.
Nineteen people are dead. The city received over 3,300 complaints from residents across all five boroughs, watching encampments grow unchecked. And the Department of Homeless Services was reportedly given no instructions on how to handle the situation after the sweeps were halted. The mayor removed the tool and offered no replacement.
This is the recurring flaw in progressive urban policy: conflating enforcement with cruelty, then discovering that the absence of enforcement doesn't produce compassion. It produces chaos, and sometimes death.
Mamdani now finds himself executing the Adams playbook while insisting it's something new. The seven-day outreach window and the 60 additional workers are real additions, but they sit on top of the same fundamental structure: the city identifies an encampment, sends people in, and eventually clears it. That's a sweep. Calling it something else doesn't change what it is.
The deeper question for New York is whether Mamdani's early months signal a mayor who learns from mistakes or one who simply retreats from them when the political cost gets high enough. The insider's observation about campaign promises rings true not because politicians break promises (they all do), but because this particular promise was so obviously untenable that making it in the first place suggests either naivety or cynicism.
Neither is reassuring when you're responsible for eight million people, and winter hasn't finished yet.
