It’s too little, too late.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s 11th-hour decision to finally tackle unsightly homeless encampments near the Intrepid Museum is doing little to get the vagrants off the street — and out of sight.
Some sidewalk squatters in the West Side shantytown are even taking down their own tents and shelters before the NYPD shows up, setting up camp elsewhere or going it alone while shunning outreach workers dispatched as part of Mamdani’s “more humane” approach to the homeless crisis.
“I feel safer in the shelter but in the street I have more freedom,” Jennifer, a 42-year-old trans crystal meth addict whose been sleeping at Bella Abzug Park, told The Post.
“You have no rules and regulations out here,” she said. “In a shelter it’s different. You have a lockdown and you have to be in by 9. Who the f–k wants to be in at 9?”
The filthy encampments, which dotted the sidewalks from roughly the floating Intrepid Museum to the Jacob K. Javits Center, have raised concerns from locals and tourists for weeks, but Mamdani’s homeless policy barred the NYPD from taking them down under the lefty mayor’s guidelines.
Mamdani’s rules kept cops in check until homeless services and outreach workers could be dispatched to counsel the homeless intruders for seven days — and only then could the encampments be taken down.
That didn’t happen until this week, when police and sanitation workers started dismantling some of the encampments, only to see the vagrants pack up and go down the block, in some cases taking it on themselves to scoot before police showed up.
On Wednesday, two NYPD officers stood by as a sanitation crew loaded foam padding and used syringes at one encampment at 34th Street and 11th Avenue, part of the city’s sweep.
“This is our third one today,” one cop said. “It’s what it is. We are trying. We are doing the best we can.”
Encampments that were on 47th and 12 and 49th and 12th have also disappeared, but the gritty occupants that once called them home have since set up shop farther south on 44th Street.
“They’re enjoying a different spot,” a frustrated food vender near the Intrepid told The Post. “Nobody f–king moved s–t. They moved by themselves. The city is a f–king bitch. Nobody can do nothing.”
Meanwhile, another encampment popped up farther down on West 24th Street and Sixth Avenue, where a small group blasted hip hop on a speaker while a young woman appeared passed out on the ground.
There’s no way to quantify how many encampments exist in the city at a given time beyond 311, which would only note shelters that generated complaints.
The city’s seven-day process also does not keep tabs on vagrants who turn down services or shelter beds.
Additional reporting by Xavier Serrano and Fenix Suriel
Read the full article here
