In late December, then Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani pledged that his incoming administration would avoid doing homeless encampment sweeps. Just two months later, the mayor has reversed course. Mamdani’s administration, like all prior ones, will use sweeps to address street homelessness.
Mamdani’s decision followed on the heels of the recent cold snap during which roughly 20 people died, several of them homeless. Mamdani had initially insisted that since no one died in an encampment, his homelessness policy was fundamentally sound. Then he blinked.
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Score one for the independent press. Without the New York Post’s sustained criticism of Mamdani’s policy, it is hard to see the mayor changing his mind so abruptly.
Most communities in America these days are news deserts. Community members follow and debate local affairs as a kind of oral culture, using Facebook or some other social media platform, without any meaningful contribution from journalists. Californians do use social media to organize against encampments, but that process is far less inefficient than one directed by professionally run news outfits. The quality and sheer amount of local press coverage makes New York not just bigger than other cities, but different.
Both New York and Chicago recently have seen a leftist mayor succeed an unpopular centrist. But since taking office in May 2023, Brandon Johnson has consistently seemed outmatched by the job. Mamdani’s fitness for office remains to be seen, but he has yet to demonstrate a sure hand, politically or managerially. Flip-flopping is bad practice for inexperienced politicians who enjoy limited trust from agency leadership and the rank and file. Through mid-February, the Mamdani administration had fielded over 3,300 encampment complaints, while issuing no clear guidance to personnel about how to respond.
One wonders how much tolerance socialists, a legendarily faction-prone tribe, will have for other Mamdani departures from their agenda. Trying to put a good spin on things, the mayor is claiming that, after taking office, he simply “paused” sweeps to allow a responsible reassessment of protocol, and that resuming them was always part of the plan. Left-wing advocates who leapt to defend Mamdani’s anti-sweep policy only days before he abandoned it described the reversal as a “another broken promise.”
Mamdani’s embrace of common sense on encampments deprives us of clarity on what a socialist approach to homelessness would actually look like. Socialists traditionally pride themselves on their principled commitment to a holistic vision, rooted in the work of Marx and other theorists. In his inaugural address, Mamdani paid homage to that tradition by speaking of “the warmth of collectivism,” which is how theoreticians, not ordinary New Yorkers, speak. But on homelessness and education—and arguably on crime—Mamdani’s socialist rhetoric seems to be mostly just that. Core policy remains shaped by external pressures, just as it was for his predecessors.
Pick your poison: an ideologue wedded to a destructively socialist agenda or an inept millennial whose first real job is running the $130 billion operation that is New York City government.
If Mamdani’s decision on encampments is about being pragmatic, that’s a brand that didn’t work for Eric Adams. Mamdani won’t find pragmatism any easier. If he underperforms managerially, as did Adams, and then abandons his principles—as he may be accused of doing, if he walks back more promises—there won’t be much left for anyone to like. And rivals will sense opportunity.
Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images