Thousands of times a year, a crew of New York City workers approaches an outdoor place where a homeless person is staying. A park bench. A stretch of sidewalk. The doorway of an abandoned building.
Sometimes the person is given a few minutes to gather any belongings and leave. But often, many or all of those possessions end up in the back of a garbage truck.
On Tuesday, a housing support group sued the city in federal court in Manhattan, saying the cleanups violated homeless people’s constitutional protections against illegal searches and seizures.
The group, the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, and six named homeless people are seeking to have the suit certified as a class action that would cover thousands of homeless people. The lawsuit accuses the city of routinely violating its own policy on cleanups, which says the city must offer to store certain types of confiscated property for up to 90 days and give the owner a voucher to claim it. The suit argues that the cleanup policy is unlawfully broad and claims that the city almost never issues vouchers or returns confiscated possessions.
Sweeps, as the cleanups are commonly called, are a linchpin of Mayor Eric Adams’s push to eliminate street homelessness, which he announced shortly after taking office in 2022 amid rising concern about general disorder in the city. At the time, there were increasing complaints about encampments blocking sidewalks and creating nuisances.
Under Mr. Adams, the city has done more than 10,000 sweeps as part of its effort to get people to move indoors to shelters, according to city data released to the Safety Net Project under the Freedom of Information Law.
But street homelessness persists. The number of people living in the streets and subway who are known to the city’s homeless outreach teams is up 84 percent since Mr. Adams took office. And a 2023 audit by the city comptroller that looked at more than 2,100 cleanups over eight months found that they resulted in only 90 people staying in a shelter for more than one night.
The city policy says that one purpose of cleanups is to “assess and provide compassionate, resource-intensive outreach.” But the suit argues that cleanups “perversely” make it harder for homeless people to obtain services, including housing, because the city often destroys their identification papers and other documents.
“Sweeps as a whole are an abject policy failure and unbelievably cruel,” said Natalie Druce, a staff attorney for the Safety Net Project.
The city declined to immediately comment on the suit.
Municipal cleanup policies are being challenged in places around the country, even after the U.S. Supreme Court in June upheld an Oregon city’s ban on homeless people sleeping outdoors. A federal lawsuit was filed in Phoenix over that city’s property seizures. In July, a federal appeals court ruled that San Francisco could conduct sweeps only if it lets people recover their property.
The New York suit lists possessions that the city has taken and destroyed. A 48-year-old woman in the West Village lost the ashes of her father and son, photos of her stillborn daughter, her food-stamp card, phones and a laptop. A transgender woman lost medication including hormones.
Damian Voorhees, 47, a plaintiff in the suit who has been homeless on the Lower East Side for six years, said he had been swept at least 50 times, often losing bikes that he repairs for money. A couple of weeks ago, he said, he had recently finished fixing a customer’s bicycle cargo trailer that lists for $4,000 when a crew came to conduct a sweep.
In a video recorded by an observer, a police officer tells him, “That’s garbage — that’s not going with you.”
“This trailer costs $4,000!” Mr. Voorhees says.
“It’s going in the trash!” the officer replies as she drags the trailer toward a sanitation truck.
For two years, Mr. Voorhees had pitched a tent by the majestic approach to the Manhattan Bridge. The city removed that encampment this month. Lately, he and several friends have been staying in a corner of Sara D. Roosevelt Park nearby. The park officially closes at 11 p.m., and the site, which had a fair amount of debris on a recent weekday afternoon, is visited by sweeps crews frequently.
Mr. Voorhees said he had never spent a night in a city shelter. “I went and saw one on the Bowery once, and it just looked a lot more dangerous than out here,” he said.
The rules on sleeping outside in New York City are murky. A “homeless bill of rights” the City Council passed last year includes a “right to sleep outside,” but in past court cases, the city has cited a piece of sanitation code that makes it unlawful to erect an obstruction in “any public place,” and it is illegal to stay in parks when they are closed.
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