Trudi and Rickey Reppi live in a tent on a triangular stretch of sidewalk between three lanes of traffic by the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. The tent serves as a headquarters of sorts for a community of homeless people and panhandlers. Dave, Rob, Richard, Russia, and Seven all often sleep outside, some on mattresses or chairs, some on cardboard and bundled-up clothing.
Others drop by frequently throughout the day, accepting packaged meals Trudi and Rickey had picked up from an aid organization (“Homeless people help each other way more than anyone in these hundred thousand dollar cars ever help us,” Trudi says) or fanning out, cardboard signs in hand, to ask passing drivers for money for hours on end.
The police arrive at about 9 a.m, flanked by outreach and Sanitation workers forming a team of around a dozen city employees. Trudi and Rickey wearily begin the weekly routine of taking down their tent, bundling up all the possessions they can carry, and leaving everything else on the side of the street for the Sanitation workers to throw away.
For years, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration has been sending joint teams of NYPD officers, Sanitation workers, and Department of Homeless Services staff to require that homeless people move from locations where they’ve set up shelter. The number of sweeps (also called “clean-ups") per week has risen dramatically in the last six months, according to homeless people, advocates and case workers.
A DHS employee, who was not authorized to speak publicly, said that the team implementing the sweeps had increased last November from about 3 to about 40. The employee said that the clean-ups would be increasing to twice a week at most encampments; eventually, he suggested, homeless people would give in and accept shelter.
Trudi says that she’s been subject to ten to fifteen sweeps in just the last three months. This count doesn’t include the nightly visits the NYPD has paid her in May, sending as many as nine police officers at 3 a.m. to demand that she take down her tent.
Trudi and Rickey Pelli's encampment at 35th and Dyer Streets, May 5th.
“In my administration, we made a decision that from our point of view, it was unacceptable to have [a] single encampment anywhere in New York City and they had to be dismantled anytime they're identified,” Mayor de Blasio said at a press conference earlier this month. “And we've been doing that now for years and it's really caused the encampments to become a rarity, but whenever we see a new one, we immediately take it down.”
But the Center for Disease Control and Prevention has explicitly recommended against clearing encampments or displacing unsheltered homeless people during the pandemic. “If individual housing options are not available, allow people who are living unsheltered or in encampments to remain where they are,” the guidelines read. “Clearing encampments can cause people to disperse throughout the community and break connections with service providers. This increases the potential for infectious disease spread.”
Neither the NYPD nor DHS responded to Gothamist’s repeated questions about the CDC guidance and about whether the city has conducted public health evaluation of the sweeps during the pandemic. The de Blasio administration argued in March that the city’s encampments weren’t large enough to meet the CDC’s criteria; however, the CDC guidance has since been updated to refer to all unsheltered people, whether or not they live in encampments.
Even before the pandemic, critics of the sweeps argued that they violate people’s civil rights (it’s legal in New York to reside on the streets), dispossess them of their property, and contribute to the increasing criminalization of the homeless.
Trudi says the city has thrown out her property against her will nearly a dozen times in recent years. Once, she said, she was panhandling a block away from her sleeping site when she saw a Sanitation worker throwing her property in the truck; when she yelled out and sprinted towards him, he jumped in the vehicle and drove off. She ran in the streets after the truck, screaming “that’s my stuff!” but it did not stop.
Police officers, DHS staff and sanitation workers at a sweep of Trudi's encampment, May 12th.
Across the street from Trudi and Rickey’s tent, there’s a nearly empty hotel. Every one of the dozens of people on the streets Gothamist spoke to for this article said they would gladly accept a private hotel room. While Mayor de Blasio has moved thousands of homeless people from shelters to double-occupancy hotel rooms, he has opposed a City Council bill to guarantee rooms to all homeless single adults—despite the fact that the federal government would foot most of the bill.
“What are they doing? What are they waiting for?” Trudi said. “I would love to get into a hotel room, to get back on my feet.”
The primary sponsor of that bill, Brooklyn Councilmember Stephen Levin, is also planning to introduce legislation to permanently end the sweeps, according to his legislative director, Elizabeth Adams.
“This is the wrong approach for our city,” Adams said of the sweeps. “The program should be halted during this pandemic, and ended long term for the health and safety of our unsheltered neighbors.”
Another DHS contracted outreach worker, who was not authorized to speak publicly, told Gothamist that she has lost touch with multiple clients displaced by clean-ups—exactly one of the reasons cited by the CDC in its guidance against them. Among case workers, she said, it’s a “commonly held view” that the clean-ups make their jobs harder, not easier: the presence of the police antagonizes homeless people and leads them to lose trust in all city employees.
Trudi and Rickey Pelli's encampment at 35th and Dyer Streets, May 5th.
Like dozens of other New Yorkers experiencing street homelessness, Thomas Pearce told Gothamist that he was certain he’d be at much greater risk of infection in crowded shelters than on the streets.
In early May, Pearce was staying in a small cardboard encampment by a shuttered business across the street from the Strand Bookstore. He’d been required to move from down the street earlier that day. When a homeless outreach police van pulled by to check on him, he gestured towards the cardboard and yelled, “This is how I socially distance!”
In addition to recommending against clearing encampments, the CDC guidelines also recommend that localities “ensure nearby restroom facilities… remain open to people experiencing homelessness 24 hours a day.”
Many homeless people told Gothamist that with many public restrooms dysfunctional or inaccessible and restaurants closed during the pandemic, it is often impossible to find a bathroom. Some squat between cars and use plastic bags. Pearce, who is on parole and worries he will be sent back to jail for public defecation, said he hadn’t relieved himself in five days.
Two days after first meeting him, we stopped to check in on Pearce, only to find him and his encampment gone. A panhandler across the street said he’d seen dozens of police officers force Thomas to take down his encampment and move the previous evening. We found him that evening a few blocks away on 2nd Ave and 9th Street.
Around thirty cops had woken Thomas from a nap, he said, told him “you’re making us look like little bitches,” and demanded that he permanently leave. He took what property he could fit in a cart, left suitcases of clothing, sleeping bags and other items behind, and did as they said. The next morning, in his new location, another policeman told him to leave. So he moved once more.
"If the city isn't going to give me a safe place to stay inside," he said, "can't they at least just let me live in peace outside?"
