Given the choice between the haven of a city shelter and a makeshift hut on the street, Gloria, a homeless woman scraping by near Manhattan’s Tompkins Square Park, says she’s staying on the street.
“I lived in the shelters,” Gloria said. “I left because there were bedbugs, the people in there were ridiculous with attitudes left and right and I was like, ‘No I’m not feeling it.'”
Gloria said she feels more at home in her own corner of the corner, a slapdash shelter she put together in the shadow of the East Village greenspace.
But Gloria may soon find that it doesn’t take a home to get evicted — just a mayor on a mission with the manpower to make an encampment disappear.
But to what end? Over the last 11 days, the city has removed more than 200 homeless encampments from city streets, an above-ground follow up to a similar initiative to remove makeshift living spaces from the subways.
And while Mayor Adams explains the move as an effort to fix the “dysfunctional city” he inherited from his predecessor, critics — including homeless people and their advocates — are saying the mayor is employing the same tactics with no real plan to address the bigger problem.
Indeed, data obtained by the Daily News shows that more than 9,000 encampments were dismantled under then-Mayor Bill de Blasio. Now, de Blasio’s “encampments manager” Shane Cox is carrying out similar policies under the new mayor and the only thing that appears to be different, homeless people say, is the explanation.
“We’ll just go to another spot and just relocate because what else do you expect us to do?” Gloria said. “You’re taking the trains away, you don’t want us in the parks or in front of buildings and you don’t want us to do this. So where do you want us to go?”
Home here is three light blue tents, a Target shopping cart, a table, a leather chair and blankets. Personal touches include several signs: “Help and love, not police brutality” and “Housing not shelters.”
The encampment sits in front of a long-abandoned former school building with open windows and graffiti covering the walls.
John, a native New Yorker, said he has been in and out of homeless shelters for the past 10 years. The so-called safe havens, he said, are anything but.
“How is a person supposed to seek help for mental health issues, or substance abuse issues in an abusive environment?” he said. “Homeless shelters and safe havens are abusive.”
Adams acknowledged Wednesday the early days of the initiative were met with mixed success. Sanitation workers had cleared 239 encampments, but only five homeless people accepted offers to move into shelters. He’s committed to creating 500 beds in “safe haven” housing that he says will be a departure from typical congregate shelters.
Undaunted, he characterized the issue as a moral one, a crisis born out of dysfunction that he inherited upon taking office.
“First of all, someone living in a tree and allowing them to live there, that’s dysfunctional,” Adams said.
“And there’s one culture that I create in this administration. It’s the culture of failure. Try. There’s nothing wrong with failing. Keep trying. Something is wrong with not trying. We put in place our process: Bringing down the encampment and then giving the help that people need, creating the safe haven beds, continue to do an evaluation to make sure we get it right. We’re going to keep trying until we get it right.”
But front-line advocates said it’s just more of the same and part of a strategy that ample evidence compiled over decades has shown does not solve homelessness.
“You know, the number of sweeps that they did is clearly higher than the number of people that are out there,” said Josh Dean, executive director of Human.NYC. “So they’re repeatedly sweeping the same locations. It doesn’t work because people need to be somewhere. If you’re not offering them somewhere better to come inside, then they can’t disappear.”
Using data obtained under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center found that one neighborhood, Greenwich Village, had the most number of dismantled encampment locations by far, suggesting that people kept coming back to set up shop after the sites were removed.
“Although Mayor Adams is portraying this as a new policy, he’s actually just doubling down on the failed strategies of the prior administration,” said Jacquelyn Simone, policy director of Coalition for the Homeless: “It’s very clear from the data that we’ve seen that the city is repeatedly sweeping the same locations and targeting the same people.”
Adams dismissed questions about whether he was continuing de Blasio’s policies. “I’m not sure what he did. That was the previous administration,” Adams said.
Kevin Parker, 66, was among those who fears he’s in Adams’ crosshairs.
“He’s looking to clean the streets, he don’t care where anybody goes,” said Parker.
“I fear it can happen any day at any time,” he said. “I’ll just be on the subways, this train and that train and make sure the cops don’t see me.”
