Close ally wants to change Mayor Adams' approach to NYC homelessness. New data helps his case.

When Mayor Eric Adams announced a plan last year to forcibly commit mentally ill people living on the streets to hospitals, advocates for homeless people were outraged.

One of them was the mayor’s close friend, famed civil liberties attorney Norman Siegel. He is considered an informal adviser to Adams, but he criticized the mayor’s policy. Siegel also decided to double down on his initiative to get people without homes to enter the city's shelter system voluntarily, seeking to prove to the mayor that he doesn’t need to commit people against their will.

“The approach was the same volunteers, consisting of the same team, go to the same location on the same day and the same time in order to attempt to win the trust of people who are unhoused,” Siegel said.

Every Thursday night, volunteers with Siegel’s Street Homeless Advocacy Project fan out across the city streets, parks and transit hubs to try to convince people to accept shelter.

Siegel's group is now two years into the effort, and has presented Adams with what it says are promising findings. Out of around 1,000 homeless New Yorkers the group has interacted with, more than 400 people have found their way into a shelter and in some cases, received additional city services like mental health support.

Siegel, 80, whose group receives support from City Hall, said the initiative should be a model for the Adams administration.

“You don't criminalize people for being out on the street,” he said. “What you have to do is you have to figure out a creative, innovative, thoughtful way to try to get people to come off the streets.”

The mayor has welcomed the news, and celebrated Siegel and his volunteers at City Hall on Thursday night. Both men are among the city’s strangest political bedfellows: Adams, a former cop, and Siegel, a civil liberties activist who has been an adversary of many mayors.

“Your ears must be ringing because I talk about this group all the time,” he told the gathering of roughly 30 people. “Just everyday people doing extraordinary things.”

The Street Homeless Advocacy Project now has more than 50 volunteers, ranging from teenagers to retirees. The group has also been growing its ranks by enlisting university students.

Adams said he touted the model to other mayors last week, when the city hosted the African American Mayors Association.

Late last year, the mayor reported that the city had involuntarily transported an average of 137 people to hospitals per week between May and December 2023. To bolster his plan, Adams called on Albany to pass legislation that he said could clarify the city’s abilities to forcibly remove people if they were deemed dangers to themselves or others. A bill that would achieve many of these aims stalled in the Legislature this spring.

In the meantime, Adams has spoken less frequently about that idea. On Tuesday, he pushed back against a reporter’s questions that suggested the city was failing to address certain quality-of-life issues stemming from homelessness and open drug use.

“If someone is standing on a street corner, clearly under the influence, but they're just standing there, it's not desirable to see it,” he said. “But we don't have the authority to say we're going to just lock that person up because of that.”

He added: “It's a combination of engaging people, building trust, giving them the services that they need. And we can't be heavy-handed in doing it.”

Siegel told Gothamist he was pleased to hear how Adams responded. He said he hoped that his many one-on-one conversations with the mayor were helping to change his thinking on the issue.

At the same time, he knows he has other options.

“I've jokingly said to him, half jokingly, that if you don't move in the direction we're talking about, I'll have to sue you,” he said.

Correction: Due to an editing error, a previous version of this story misstated the Adams administration's actions when bringing people to hospitals. The people were transported against their will.