A flashpoint in Wednesday’s Voice of the Voter debate came when candidate and City Councilmember Mary Lupien asked incumbent Malik Evans a pointed question.
“Mayor Evans, will you commit to ending the sweeps?” Lupien asked.
The question came during a debate about homeless encampments, and how the city deals with the homeless population. Evans offered a succinct response.
“We don’t do homeless sweeps in the city of Rochester,” Evans said. “We never have. Every time we work with people, we make sure we’re connecting them with resources.”
That answer was rebuffed by Lupien as “not accurate.” But the Evans administration has maintained that while, yes, the city has cleared encampments, it does not meet what they define as a “sweep.”
‘Five days before Christmas’
Lupien had pointed to an incident in late 2024. The city cleared an encampment on South Clinton Avenue ahead of a winter storm — “five days before Christmas,” Lupien said. She implied that was done for the benefit of visitors to the Roc Holiday Village.
A city spokesperson had argued at the time that the action was taken out of compassion, as freezing temperatures and a blizzard loomed over the coming weekend.
“We know how it looks to go down there and do this,” spokesperson Barbara Pierce said at that time. “But how would it look if we were going down there with a body bag?”
All of the residents of that camp were offered transportation to Code Blue warming shelters by the city. None accepted the offer.
Amy D’Amico, an attorney and homeless advocate, argued that even if resources are offered, there are barriers to placing encampment residents into stable housing, ranging from sanctions to mental health issues that make congregate settings untenable.
“Shelters are often unavailable for people who are sanctioned or over income,” D’Amico said. “...There's not a quick solution, because we don't have enough housing.”
What is a ‘sweep’?
Whether the clearing of a site is a “sweep” depends on your definition of “sweep,” Pierce said.
She argued the fact that the city offered relocation and resources to camp residents means that the clearing of that camp could not be considered an encampment sweep. The common practice under the Evans administration has been to provide resources, including storage of belongings and transportation to shelters.
Evans declined to comment for this story Friday, as he was participating in City Council budget hearings.
Rochester Police Chief David Smith addressed the issue during city budget hearings on Thursday. Councilmember Michael Patterson had asked Smith what the city’s actions are, if not sweeps.
“It’s outreach,” Smith said. “It’s outreach, and in the end, if need be, it’s relocation.”
D’Amico said the argument the city is making is semantics, and that Evans’ claim was disingenuous.
“Some of the people I’ve talked to said it’s too aggressive to call him a liar,” D’Amico said. “But it’s just so obvious and blatant given everything we know.”
Lupien never got her requested commitment, but the exchange offered an opportunity for mayoral challenger Shashi Sinha to lament the political establishment.
“This is our government,” Sinha said. “It’s been happening for so many years. It’s a very manageable problem, but these guys keep fighting. They can’t solve it.”
Not the only camp
While the December actions Lupien referred to are the most recent, it was not the first clearing of a homeless camp done by the Evans administration.
In 2022, about a dozen people were living in a makeshift encampment on Loomis Street. Most of the residents were in active opiate addiction, and the area was often strewn with used needles and trash.
It was the first year of Evans’ term in office, and word of a planned sweep began circulating in September. The plan went into action in November, when Rochester police and city workers began to clear the encampment. The location was fenced off, no trespassing signs were placed, and residents were relocated to shelters and the sanctioned homeless encampment known as Peace Village.
Letters circulated by the Rochester Police Department warned encampment residents that they would be arrested if they did not leave the property. The property the camp was on is city-owned, and the intended charge was trespassing.
During the debate, Evans made a point to say that his administration had never arrested someone for being homeless.
“It's also disingenuous to mention that, because they do threaten people with arrests,” D’Amico said.
Evans isn’t the first mayor to confront homeless encampments.
One of the starkest examples came a decade earlier, on Dec. 20, 2014, under then-Mayor Lovely Warren, when city workers used a Bobcat front-end loader to scoop up and drop dozens of tents and other belongings into a rolloff container and clear an encampment known as Sanctuary Village. That camp hosted about 30 to 35 people on the Genesee riverbank beneath the Interstate 490 bridge.
The clearing of another homeless encampment in 2018 on South Avenue, also under the Warren administration, led to the establishment of Peace Village, the city’s only sanctioned homeless encampment.
That site is currently undergoing development, including permanent shelters, running water, and electricity.
