A group of six unhoused New Yorkers filed a lawsuit against the City of New York on Oct. 29, seeking to prevent city agencies from conducting homeless sweeps.

The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleges the city consistently violates the constitutional rights of unhoused people by failing to notify them of impending sweeps. City workers also routinely destroy personal belongings like warm clothes, identification documents, medications, and bedding during the sweeps.

The lawsuit also asserts that city agencies routinely flout their own rules regarding how sweeps can be conducted. For instance, the city requires confiscated items to be stored for 90 days, and the owner must receive a voucher to claim the property. However, the lawsuit alleges the city rarely issues those vouchers, which results in people losing their personal property.

The plaintiffs are represented by the Urban Justice Center—Safety Net Project, the National Homelessness Law Center, and Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP. The lawsuit was filed at a time when local data shows that more than 4,100 New Yorkers experience unsheltered homelessness in the city, representing a more than 2% increase from last year.

“The damaging effects of the sweeps policy represent an abject failure of New York City governance and exacerbate the trend of criminalizing homelessness that has been escalating across the country,” Siya Hegde, a staff attorney for the National Homelessness Law Center, said in a statement.

Adams’ Sweeps Plan and Its Consequences

Sweeps have been critical to Mayor Eric Adams’ push to end street homelessness in New York. In 2022, Adams told the New York Times that the city was going to “rid the encampments off our street, and we’re going to place people in healthy living conditions with wraparound services.”

That plan included ramping up the number of sweeps the city conducted to roughly 500 per month in 2023, according to data included in the lawsuit. Overall, the Adams administration has conducted more than 10,000 sweeps since he took office.

Read the full article about the lawsuit against New York City sweeps by Robert Davis at Invisible People.