#Mayor Bill de Blasio vows crackdown on Manhattan homeless camps — again

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Mayor Bill de Blasio
Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office

One day after a de facto homeless encampment was cleared from the shadow of City Hall, Mayor Bill de Blasio and his self-proclaimed “zero-tolerance” policy had to answer Thursday for three more across Manhattan.

Hizzoner was grilled in his daily press briefings about three new camps that have reportedly cropped up in the borough.

“Anyone who tells us about an encampment, we’re going to have it addressed right away by Homeless Services, Sanitation, PD,” de Blasio said. “Whatever it takes.”

The installations have appeared at West 55th Street and 10th Avenue in Hell’s Kitchen, at West 10th Street and Seventh Avenue South in the West Village and at West 24th Street and Sixth Avenue in Chelsea, according to 1010 WINS.

The problem has become so severe that area residents and business owners have had trouble getting into their buildings around the trash-strewn camps, while calls to 311 and the NYPD have gone unheeded, the station reported.

Hizzoner vowed to bring a swift end to the sidewalk camps, as he has throughout his two terms in office, only to watch them re-emerge elsewhere in the city.

“Overwhelmingly, we’ve been successful in recent years, making sure that encampments did not continue in New York City, as they did for decades,” he said. “When we see them, we stop them, and sometimes it does take a couple of days, but we’ve managed to do it successfully with very little reoccurrence.”

The promise came one day after de Blasio finally took action to remove the ostensible remnants of the Occupy City Hall encampment from Lower Manhattan.

The demonstration — which began in June to pressure pols into delivering a $1 billion cut to the NYPD’s budget in the new fiscal year — had largely petered, becoming mostly populated by vagrants who left behind a disaster zone of graffiti, litter and human waste.

Lawmakers and homeless advocates said that the fact that the city still has encampments to clear out shows de Blasio has failed to address the root issues, including widespread unemployment created by the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The encampments are symptomatic of a not very successful outreach strategy,” said City Councilman Stephen Levin (D-Manhattan).

“Most of the time you’ll hear from people they feel safer in an encampment than they do in one of those larger congregate shelters,” continued Levin, who chairs the Council’s General Welfare Committee.

“Ultimately, you have to work with everybody individually but you have to have the resources to offer [them].


“The problem is they don’t have anything to offer them.”

Added Joseph Loonam, a homeless advocate for Vocal NY, “Homelessness has increased dramatically during COVID as a result of illegal evictions and job loss.

“Until the city comes up with a robust program to house people, they’re going to see folks on the streets.”