Adams Cleans Up Bronx’s Hub, but Drug Scene and Homeless Shuffle Remain Nearby

An embattled mayor’s drug-market clean-up in the South Bronx has revived debate over whether public-order crackdowns can outpace the city’s deeper social ills.

On a humid morning last week, passers-by at Roberto Clemente Plaza in the South Bronx paused with a mixture of surprise and disbelief. Gone were the clusters of loiterers, the tangled piles of used syringes edging the planters, and the bitter waft of neglect that has long clung to the shopping district known as the Hub. The transformation was as conspicuous as it was abrupt. Hours before, city workers had swarmed the site, guided by New York’s ever-watchful press and the electoral calendar. Into this rarefied calm strode Mayor Eric Adams, flanked by department chiefs and fresh garbage bags, to pronounce Roberto Clemente Plaza “safe, clean, and drug-free”—at least, for now.

The plaza has, since its opening in 2018, been both a commercial crossroads and a magnet for New Yorkers battered by homelessness and opioid addiction. Since February, the Adams administration’s “multiagency” operation—anchored by the NYPD, the city’s health, sanitation and social services departments—has tried to stem the area’s open-air drug trade, vagrancy, and public nuisance. According to City Hall, more than 1,000 arrests and 4,000 summonses have been issued in just five months, a blitz reminiscent of older, more punitive New York. The city claims over 100,000 pounds of food distributed, thousands of outreach encounters, and 56 shelter placements—modest yields compared to the scale of disenfranchisement concentrated at the Hub.

Local shopkeepers hardly weep for the plaza’s old squalor. “Fighting and stealing, fighting and stealing, every day an issue,” said Arik Turjman, whose 12-year-old clothing shop, Lola, is closing for good this month, driven out by both high rent and the perpetual churn of disorder. Since the mayor’s sweep, foot traffic has rebounded, and the stench is gone. Yet many who once idled in the plaza simply relocated a block or two away, shifting the symptoms rather than banishing the underlying affliction. Some residents, exhausted from years of inaction, view the operation less as a renaissance than as an elaborate bit of theatre, timed to polish the mayor’s record during a difficult re-election contest.

Superficially, the campaign signals a return to the “broken windows” policing that defined New York’s transformation in the 1990s and early 2000s. As in those years, the City hopes to choke disorderly conduct at its source, thereby lifting both property values and spirits. This time, though, the social fabric seems flimsier. Drug deaths citywide—much of it opioid overdoses—far outpace 20th-century peaks, and affordable housing is scarcer. The NYPD remains an embattled institution, with morale described by insiders as tepid. (Lawsuits and shifting political winds have hardly helped.)

Just as troubling are the numbers behind the city’s social interventions. Of more than 1,000 homeless outreach encounters in the Hub, 56 shelter placements is a paltry figure. Epidemiologists might note that ad hoc displacement can spread, rather than contain, health crises among drug users. Service providers fear that those unwilling or unable to access services will retreat further from supervision, increasing their risk of overdose or victimization.

The effort brings New York into step with a national trend toward visible disorder crackdowns—and the social controversies that follow. San Francisco, Portland, and Philadelphia have all wrestled with, and failed to eradicate, open-air drug markets using similar tactics. Internationally, European cities from Lisbon to Amsterdam have found more durable, if slower, results by coupling tolerance zones with robust addiction treatment and social housing. Many of these alternatives are, for now, taboo in America’s toxic political climate: local elections, not clinical outcomes, drive policy timelines.

This raises a vexing question: is cleanliness its own justification? Few would dispute that revitalising commercial districts can buoy local economies and lessen residents’ daily stress. The risk, however, is that such blitzes will portend little more than a spatial rearrangement of deprivation. Temporary, police-led clean-ups cannot substitute for an adequate shelter system or a functioning social safety net. They are the municipal equivalent of sweeping dust under a rug—efficient, perhaps, but rarely transformative.

Prodding the limits of order without fixing the causes

Mayor Adams remains keen to trumpet public safety as a path to economic prosperity, echoing campaign slogans from 2021. In practical terms, however, prosperity will remain distant for local merchants like Mr. Turjman, who are unlikely to see lower rents or more robust social supports as a result of the crackdown. National comparisons do little to soothe: New York’s rate of shelter placements from street outreach mirrors those of San Francisco and Los Angeles, with similarly lacklustre outcomes.

Political necessity almost guarantees a continuation of such spectacles. No mayor who hopes to remain in office can allow flagship plazas to become, in the words of critics, “no-go zones.” Meanwhile, city budgets—already burdened by ballooning shelter costs and federal aid uncertainty—have little capacity for more ambitious solutions. Technocrats might yearn for evidence-based public health approaches, but the mechanics of governance remain, for now, more responsive to photo opportunities than to protracted, incremental progress.

Were we to wager, we would bet that the order imposed at Clemente Plaza will not long outlast this mayoral term. The pattern is durable: intensive short-term policing, localised improvements, and the eventual return of those dislocated, poorly served, and increasingly alienated. A bolder city might pilot safe consumption sites, harm-reduction clinics, or invest heavily in supportive housing rather than enforcement; but such ideas remain, for now, marginal in both municipal debate and resource allocation.

Still, we must reckon with incrementalism, however unsatisfying. In the contest between visible disorder and performative order, some victories—however modest or puny—occasionally help. Cleaner streets may not heal decades of economic and social dislocation, but they are unlikely to hurt. New Yorkers may rightly greet official celebration with scepticism, but even fleeting improvements can foster some civic hope.

As New York’s experiment in selective tidiness plays out, we ought to measure its impacts with honesty: on merchants’ viability, on the dignity of vulnerable populations, and on the city’s appetite for more far-sighted remedies. If present trends hold, the battle for the city’s most troubled blocks will grind on, pitting short-term spectacle against the hard slog of social repair. ■