The ashes of deceased relatives, warm clothes in the dead of winter, personal documents and irreplaceable family photographs are just some of the items New Yorkers say were thrown away homeless encampment sweeps that often take place with little or no warning, according to a new federal lawsuit filed Tuesday.
The city’s own internal policies require at least 48 hours warning ahead of such sweeps, and for people to have most of their belongings stored for up to 90 days.
But in practice, the new lawsuit filed by six homeless New Yorkers and the Urban Justice Center Safety Net Project alleges that city officials regularly violate those procedures, sweeping encampments over and over again with little or no warning and simply throwing people’s possessions away.
The plaintiffs are seeking to have the suit certified as a class action, which would allow thousands of other homeless people impacted by these sweeps to join the case, which alleges that the city is violating the Fourth Amendment’s protection from unreasonable searches and seizures.
While the suit, which was first reported by The New York Times, describes repeated interactions between homeless outreach workers and the plaintiffs, as they were only offered transportation to drop-in centers — where the wait for a bed could last days.
Three of the six plaintiffs still live on city streets, while another three now have safe haven beds at shelters with less restrictive rules and fewer roommates but only after the Safety Net Project intervened on their behalf.
“Sweeps are cruel, counterproductive, and cause immense harm to homeless New Yorkers,” said Natalie Druce, a staff attorney with the Urban Justice Center – Safety Net Project in a statement announcing the lawsuit, which names defendants including the City of New York, Mayor Eric Adams, acting NYPD Commissioner Thomas Donlon, Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Park and Sanitation Commissioner Jessica Tisch.
“Not only is the City’s conduct unlawful but it is punitive and ineffective—homeless people are being policed, punished for their existence in public space, and pushed further away from permanent housing,” Druce said.
William Fowler, a spokesperson for Adams, defended the city’s approach to homeless encampments, saying more than 2,000 people who had lived on the streets made it into permanent housing in the past two fiscal years.
“The city’s homeless encampment outreach and clean up efforts operate under one defining principle: that there is nothing dignified about being forced to sleep on the streets,” Fowler said. “Rather than walking past an encampment and doing nothing to help those in need, we treat people experiencing homelessness with dignity, offering to connect them to housing, health care, and to properly store their valuables while temporary structures not meant to be lived in are removed.”
The city’s Law Department will review the lawsuit, Fowler added.
“We’re going to rid the encampments off our street and we’re going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services,” Adams told the Times in March of 2022, promoting the sweeps his administration has referred to as “clean-ups.”
“I’m looking to do it within a two weeks’ period.”
The next month, Adams, appearing at a clean-up, said that “’I can’t help but to believe that if [apostles] Matthew, Mark, Luke and John was here today, he would be on the streets with me, helping people get out of encampments.’
‘You Don’t Know Where to Go’
The sweeps are part of longstanding city policy to curb the seemingly intractable problem of street homelessness. New York City’s unique “right to shelter” protections under the state constitution and its cold winters mean many more homeless New Yorkers are housed indoors than in other cities.
People who remain outside often do so because they prefer it to the city’s notoriously dangerous and overcrowded congregate shelter system where dozens of people are assigned to a single room.
In an annual count of street homeless this past January, volunteers tallied more than 4,000 people, the highest number in more than a decade.
City data shared from the Urban Justice Center Safety Net Project, obtained through a Freedom of Information request, showed more than 1,000 homeless New Yorkers were caught up in encampment sweeps between January and June of this year, with hundreds of encampment sweeps each month.
In June, the most recent month for which data was available, city agencies conducted 469 encampment sweeps, a number that has fluctuated between 200 and 500 each month in the time Adams has been in office.
Gerald Bethel and Trese Chapman, a couple who became homeless last July after they got kicked out of an apartment they didn’t realize they had been subletting in violation of the lease, said they had regularly received 12 to 48 hours notice before city officials came to sweep their encampment by Union Square. That changed over the summer, the lawsuit alleges, when city agencies started sweeping their encampment regularly with no notice.
“City representatives informed Mr. Bethel and Ms. Chapman that they no longer needed to provide notice because they were what they deemed ‘chronically homeless’” the lawsuit alleges.
Eduardo Ventura, another plaintiff in the lawsuit, was subjected to at least 18 encampment sweeps between August and December of last year while living outside in the East Village. City officials confiscated his warm clothing, cell phones, blankets, along with his permanent resident card, driver’s permit, medicaid card, and passport.
“Imagine being outside living on the street and people come up to you telling you to leave the area, but you don’t know where to go,” said Eduardo Ventura, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, in a statement.
“Do I go to another street, do I go to the subway station, do I go to another corner just to get pushed out again? It’s a huge disruption to our lives,” he said.
Antonia Hayes, another plaintiff who lived on the streets of the West Village described enduring repeated sweeps without notice, or sometimes a notice was posted but city officials turned up days in advance. She’d lost the ashes of her two children and father, the birth and death certificates of her children, her artwork, a laptop and cell phones and personal identification, the lawsuit alleges.
Plaintiff Damian Voorhees who lived on the streets of the Lower East Side, described the sweeps as “a virtual leash.” In the course of at least 20 sweeps so far this year, he has lost bedding, warm clothing, his social security card, birth certificate, and New York State identification in at least 20 sweeps so far this year, according to the lawsuit.
“It’s keeping me in the position that I’m in that they’re supposedly trying to get me out of,” he said in a statement. “I have to make a choice between leaving my belongings and going to work for the day and possibly coming back to nothing or staying at my site and babysitting my stuff.”
