Mamdani’s Hands-Off Approach to Homeless Camps Could Spell Disaster for NYC

By James Lynch

Thursday, January 01, 2026

 

If socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) lives up to his promises, Big Apple residents can expect to see a proliferation of homeless encampments and public drug use on their streets.

 

Ahead of his swearing-in, Mamdani promised to eliminate police sweeps of homeless encampments on the grounds that merely enforcing laws against public camping and drug use does little to shepherd the homeless population into permanent housing. Instead, Mamdani has proposed a Department of Community Safety, which will be tasked with responding to mental health crises — a job Mamdani argues the police are poorly equipped to handle — and connecting the homeless to permanent housing solutions.

 

The problem, policy experts tell National Review, is that the population that typically inhabits homeless encampments have already proven themselves resistant to moving into shelters, where drug use and disruptive behavior are curtailed, and they are consequently not prepared to inhabit unsupervised residences funded by the city.

 

“A very small portion of the homeless population lives on the street, but that tends to be the most disordered and challenging population,” said Devon Kurtz, public safety policy director at the Cicero Institute, an Austin, Texas–based conservative think tank.

 

“Only about 4% of New York’s homeless population is unsheltered,” Kurtz explained. “So you’re talking about a very, very small portion, but these are people who are refusing the available services in shelter in part because of their behavioral health factors and in part because they’re just simply involved in criminal activity in these encampments.”

 

Already, New York City has generous “right to shelter” laws for the homeless and offers ample resources to those looking for assistance. But, research suggests the homeless people who end up in street encampments are typically mentally ill and addicted to drugs. They also have much higher rates of violent criminality than the general population, a situation made worse when they’re concentrated in unpoliced encampments.

 

According to city data, outgoing Mayor Eric Adams’s administration conducted 4,100 homeless encampment sweeps over an 18-month period spanning from January 2024 to June 2025. Because those sweeps prioritized maintaining public safety and order, rather than connecting a reluctant population to permanent housing, Mamdani declared them a failure.

 

“We cannot allow ourselves to become complacent with what has become the norm in this city,” Mamdani said at a press conference earlier this month. “And that doesn’t mean leaving New Yorkers to sleep in the cold. It means connecting those New Yorkers with a place that they can actually be warm.”

 

A worthy goal, no doubt, but one that the mayor and his administration likely have little ability to effectuate, at least in the short term, due to the particular challenges associated with the population of homeless people who have thus far refused to take advantage of the city’s shelters.

 

Homeless people are 130 times more likely to commit violent crimes than the general population, and much more likely to be registered sex offenders. Additionally, homeless people are 514 times more likely to commit arson than the general public, creating a major safety hazard for residents in nearby buildings, especially if Department of Community Safety social workers lack the coercive powers delegated to the police.

 

The combination of drug addiction and violent crime means those living out on the street have a three times higher likelihood of death than the homeless in shelters. Overall, homeless people have ten times the mortality rate of those in prisons and jail. On the flip side, homeless people are much more likely to be murdered and sexually assaulted than the general public because of their circumstances and criminality among their population.

 

Mamdani’s plan to leave homeless encampments in place rests on the notion that the camp inhabitants will be better off so long as they’re provided permanent housing. That philosophy is shared by left-wing policymakers in California, who established a program of providing state-funded hotel rooms and apartments to the homeless during Covid, no strings attached. The policy led to the complete destruction of the motels and apartment buildings that population was given access to, as well as a massive rise in drug overdoses among the unsupervised residents.

 

A responsible housing solution that accounts for the significant obstacles that separate the average homeless camp resident from independent living would take years and a lot of creative policy making to develop. Meanwhile, homeless camps would go unpoliced.

 

“Mamdani says what we need is permanent supportive housing for the homeless, especially for the unsheltered. And there’s two main problems with this. Number one, that that this stuff would not become available for years or decades,” said Judge Glock, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a New York-based conservative think tank specializing in urban policy.

 

On top of that, the families currently in the shelter system, who are in many circumstances better prepared to live independently, would fall through the cracks.

 

“Why are you going to give people that are unsheltered priority in permanent housing versus the people, and especially families, that are in the shelter system for permanent housing. That is a very, very bad incentive, and there is a reason that many cities do not do that. They do not want people to move up the shelter system by telling them, if we clear an encampment, we will give you housing indefinitely, for the rest of your life,” he added.

 

“They should be putting people down the encampments in shelters, and part of the general system that everyone else has to do, and not giving them basically lifetime housing, because they refuse to go to the shelter system.”

 

Allowing homeless camps to operate unabated is bad for the homeless, but it also disproportionately harms the city’s lower-income residents.

 

Data show that an increase in homeless encampments would jeopardize public safety for those in the impacted neighborhoods, which are typically poor and working-class areas, and the homeless people themselves.

 

“These will overwhelmingly continue in poor and working-class areas, that most this is not the encampments are not springing up in Gramercy Park, for obvious reasons. The encampments are springing up in much poorer and lower income neighborhoods,” Glock said.

 

Making matters worse, the outgrowth of homeless encampments effectively makes public spaces unusable for neighborhood residents and their children. This burden would also fall on poor and working-class families, who have less ability to access recreational spaces elsewhere.

 

“New York City in particular, does not have a bottomless well of public space. It is a very tight city where every square foot of green space is very highly valued by people in the neighborhood,” Glock said. “For the obvious reason, there is not a lot of it, and effectively giving over large chunks of the public space, of parks, of sidewalks and others to indefinite encampments, means no one else can use them.”

 

These factors are unlikely to persuade the new mayor and the leftist activist class insistent on allowing the homeless camps to grow unabated. For them, homelessness is an ideological wedge against the entire capitalist system they seek to dismantle and replace.

 

“ I think the bigger problem is ideological. There is a strong belief among these organizations that homelessness exists as a result of capitalism, and that unless you abolish capitalism, you will never actually abolish homelessness,” Kurtz said.

 

“There’s also a strong belief that psychiatric treatment is actually wrong. It’s what could be described as the anti-psychiatry movement, which is very, very strong in these circles. They don’t believe that schizophrenics ought to be treated, that in fact they should be allowed to live in this sort of alternative existence.”

 

Moreover, greater public visibility of homeless people could strengthen political support for more funding of homeless services, potentially enriching activist-oriented nonprofit organizations through increased public grants. This small but influential activist lobby considers permanent housing for homeless people who refuse to go to shelters to be the only solution to the problem.

 

“There is a small but radical homeless advocacy lobby that has convinced many people in public office for years, most importantly among the progressive left in urban centers, that the only solution to these encampments is offering heavily subsidized or free housing for the rest of their lives, for anybody in them, and that’s their position,” Glock emphasized.

 

Throughout the campaign, Mamdani took pains to distance himself from his past support for defunding the police. His decision to retain well-regarded police commissioner Jessica Tisch reflects Mamdani’s initial attempt to take a more pragmatic approach to law-and-order than his history would indicate.

 

Mamdani begins his mayoral tenure as a leftist upstart whose natural charisma and penchant for virality turned him into a national phenomenon. If homelessness and disorder spike under his watch, his political fortunes could change quickly.