The Big Apple is about to take on a new name — Tent City, or Filth City. Or perhaps Lepto City, after leptospirosis, a bacterial infection increasingly found in homeless encampments.
New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, is barring the New York Police Department from closing down encampments.
Since Mamdani previewed his policy in December, new encampments are emerging in many neighborhoods. The consequences are dire both for vagrants and for the city’s viability.
A little over a week ago, when the city was hit with a bone-chilling winter storm, eight people were found dead outdoors, suggesting they were homeless. Mamdani conceded that several of the victims were known to the city’s shelter system.
As the encampments pop up, neighborhood residents call 311, but the NYPD is now powerless. Even New York’s Strongest — the sanitation workers — are barred from clearing the encampments. They’ve got orders to remove garbage and human waste but leave mattresses, clothing, makeshift cardboard huts and other items intact.
In other words, provide maid service, but don’t actually clear the dangerous mess.
Outraged City Councilwoman Joann Ariola, who watched this new procedure play out along Jamaica Avenue, in Queens, asked, “What next, a city-funded turndown service?”
Everyone should be outraged. Mamdani is showing a misguided brand of compassion for the homeless, and no compassion for residents and business owners. Encampments bring crime, filth and a distressing decline in street civility.
They also threaten the reemergence of infections like leptospirosis, which is spreading through an encampment in Berkeley, California, right now. The germ is found in rat urine but is also spread via contaminated surfaces or liquids. The frigid temperatures in New York lower the risk, but when things warm up, New Yorkers living near encampments will have to tell their kids not to jump in puddles or touch items on the street.
Even local Democrats are infuriated by Mamdani’s unwillingness to clear encampments. Gale Brewer, a City Council member representing the Upper West Side, said, “You cannot have defecating, you cannot have food on the street, you cannot have all these boxes.” So far, Mamdani insists you can.
His predecessor, Eric Adams, aggressively removed encampments, saying, “We cannot tolerate these makeshift, unsafe houses on the side of highways, in trees, in front of schools, in parks. This is just not acceptable.”
But Mamdani’s policy is all about the homeless, not about the rest of the public: “We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing.”
Sorry, that’s one mission, Mr. Mayor. But you are also responsible for ensuring the safety and comfort of the rest of the city’s population, as well as its tourists and business visitors. Your policy is giving all of them the middle finger.
No town or city should have to tolerate encampments. Weighing the “rights” of the homeless against the needs of communities, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2024 that towns can remove encampments.
Justice Neil Gorsuch explained that otherwise, “with encampments dotting neighborhood sidewalks, adults and children in these communities are sometimes forced to navigate around used needles, human waste, and other hazards to make their way to school, the grocery store, or work.”
That’s what New Yorkers are facing now.
Since the 2024 ruling, Democratic politicians, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom and many California mayors, have aggressively removed encampments.
Mamdani is heading in the opposite direction, subjecting Gotham to a predictable increase in crime and contagions.
Los Angeles Police Department crime data show that from 2018 to 2022, the homeless made up 1% of the population but 11% to 15% of all violent crime suspects.
Nationwide, 13% of the homeless in encampments are registered sex offenders, and in some states, such as Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, that figure is a staggering 50% or more, reports the Cicero Institute. You don’t want to walk by a homeless encampment after dark, or have your children navigate around one on their way to school.
Mamdani says he’s doing what’s right for the homeless, keeping their presence a visible eyesore, putting pressure on the city to provide them with housing.
In truth, he’s making them victims too, mere ploys in his political calculations. The life expectancy of someone living on the streets is, on average, 27 years lower than that of someone who is not. Some fall victim to crime or disease, but most die from alcohol or drug overdoses, often lying under a cardboard box or on a urine-soaked mattress.
Adams said it best, lamenting that there is nothing compassionate or “‘progressive’ about leaving people to freeze in makeshift encampments. It … dehumanizes the very people who need help.”
Betsy McCaughey is a former Lt. Governor of New York State and Chairman & Founder of the Committee to Reduce Infection Deaths at www.hospitalinfection.org
