Mamdani wants to end homeless encampment sweeps to focus on housing. HUD funding chaos will complicate his plans

When Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced last week that he would end the practice of clearing homeless encampments, advocates for the homeless said that the decision was a win, viewing it as a shift from criminalizing homelessness to permanently housing people. But drastic funding shifts playing out on the federal level may threaten this approach and have already been quietly reshaping how New York City supportive housing projects are operating. 

President Donald Trump’s administration announced the significant shift regarding its approach to homelessness last month: from long-term housing to short-term shelters with many eligibility requirements. It’s a stance on the homelessness crisis that will complicate the city’s approach to housing people, as Mamdani commits to ending encampment sweeps.   

“We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing, whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is,” Mamdani said last week, explaining his decision to end the sweeps at a press conference.

But under the new rules, the Department of Housing and Urban Development would greatly reduce the portion of “Continuum of Care” funding for permanent housing, while increasing the portion of funding that goes toward temporary shelter and adding work or service requirements. In New York City, this would mean that the current $170 million in funding for permanent housing for homeless people could be reduced to $52 million, according to estimates from Tierra Labrada, director of policy and advocacy at the Supportive Housing Network of New York, which represents over 200 nonprofit providers. The new rules also encourage crackdowns on homeless camps and they appear to target organizations that support trans or nonbinary people and ones that have used DEI language, The New York Times reported. 

State Attorney General Letitia James, along with attorneys general from multiple other states, sued to stop the changes last month. HUD temporarily withdrew the controversial funding changes on Monday just 90 minutes ahead of a court hearing, but the agency has emphasized that it “fully stands by” the original changes and wrote in a statement to City & State that it will reissue them “as quickly as possible with technical corrections.”   

The encampment sweeps, during which the police, parks and sanitation workers show up and rapidly throw away the belongings of people who have built temporary outdoor shelters, have become a hallmark policy of Mayor Eric Adams’ administration. But the city under Adams has also prioritized supportive housing. Adams announced in the spring that he would bolster a major supportive housing initiative, put in place by former Mayor Bill de Blasio, by building 6,000 more congregate apartments with on-site health and social services. Representatives from Mamdani’s transition team told City & State that the administration plans to fulfill those commitments as they seek to end encampment sweeps. 

The upcoming administration also said that in ending sweeps, they will rely on the mayor-elect’s proposed Department of Community Safety, rather than the NYPD, for outreach to people experiencing homelessness and invest more in Safe Haven shelters, which aim to house people in acute situations without paperwork barriers.  

Despite Adams’ prioritization of supportive housing, few people experiencing homelessness have been placed into permanent supportive housing since the sweeps began in 2022, city data shows. In the first half of 2025, out of the 1,093 homeless people who had their encampments swept, none went to supportive housing, while 89 entered transitional housing upon removal, according to the most recent Department of Homeless Services figures reviewed by City & State.

Erica Crew, housing campaigns manager with VOCAL-NY, said ending homelessness requires both short- and long-term housing options – and shouldn’t involve police. 

“It's a web of solutions, ideally to improve access to permanent supportive housing as well as to the shelter system,” Crew said in an interview with City & State. “But of course, we want to reduce people's touch points with law enforcement and the police as much as possible.”

However, critics, including Gov. Kathy Hochul and Adams, have pushed back against Mamdani’s plan to end the sweeps, arguing that both sweeps and connection to housing are needed to address homelessness in the city.  

“There is nothing “progressive” about leaving people to freeze in makeshift encampments. It harms residents and dehumanizes the very people who need help,” Adams said on X after Mamdani announced his policy. 

Acting Housing Preservation Department Commissioner Ahmed Tigani visited D.C. this week to advocate for “full funding” for supportive housing and Section 8 vouchers, HPD spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach wrote in a statement to City & State.

“These changes, combined with the truncated timeline for applications, places New York City’s entire ecosystem of supportive housing providers at serious risk of financial instability in 2026,” Tigani and other city officials wrote in a letter, obtained by City & State, sent to city’s congressional delegation on Dec. 9.   

Christine Quinn, CEO and president of the homeless services nonprofit Win, said she has already been organizing within Win’s supportive housing to ensure funding. 

“It's a devastating cut. The thing is, it's not like just Win is going to be cut. So as we go out and try to fundraise to fill the gap, everybody's going to be out there fundraising.”

Quinn said she is confident Mamdani, more than Adams, will be a strong advocate for federal funding to be restored to New York City.      

Labrada said the supportive housing developments in her network have already had to make “really hard decisions” about which projects to prioritize to “maximize their funding.” These “hard decisions” include the fact that supportive housing projects that are usually renewed on an annual basis by HUD are not being guaranteed renewal by the federal department this year. 

A new supportive housing project proposed by the city in West Harlem could be dead on arrival as its developer, the Bowery Residents Committee, would be impacted by the proposed federal cuts. 

“There is so much danger of that funding getting cut. If that's the case, then the funding for this project goes, or it could, and it might be hard to regain it,” said Ria McDonald, a Columbia Law student and member of Community Board 9, where the project is being developed. The Bowery Residents Committee did not respond to City & State’s request for comment. 

If the cuts go through, Mamdani’s transition team told City & State that the administration will “get creative,” utilizing city and state funds to support housing access.  

While Labrada said she was grateful that HUD’s Monday withdrawal ensures funding temporarily, she described the decision as “chaotic.” 

“It's confusing. It was unexpected. We have no idea what they're going to do next, and that is part of the problem,” Labrada said.