NYC Attempts to Stop Homeless People From Sheltering on Subways

On the first morning rush hour since Mayor Eric Adams announced a sweeping plan on Friday to remove homeless people who shelter in the New York City subway, the transit system felt a little different.

Judith Williams, who has lived in and around the subway for years, said she noticed fewer people sleeping sprawled out on trains the last couple of days.

“Maybe they’re getting the message,” she said Tuesday at a station in Brooklyn.

At Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan, outreach workers in orange vests, carrying clipboards, fanned out in search of homeless people to help. Police officers approached two men, one sleeping at the foot of a staircase, another lying on the floor, and told them they had to move.

Manuel de Jesús Delgado and some of the other regulars who shelter inside the Jamaica-Van Wyck station in Queens took a look at the gaggle of police officers patrolling the platform and headed up an escalator.

“What am I supposed to do when there are four of them standing there with guns and badges?” Mr. de Jesús, 72, asked in Spanish. “We can’t stay there.” Inside the station, Al Walker, 61, who was heading to work, said he was “shocked” that the platform, usually full of homeless people, was empty except for riders hopping on and off trains. “The mayor really got them on their toes,” he said.

But a sprawling subway system with 472 stations and thousands of train cars in service is hard to transform overnight, especially when people who have been sheltering in the system, sometimes for years, feel they do not have a more appealing alternative on a raw February morning.

Ms. Williams said that while the police had rousted her off the floor of the subway platform overnight, they agreed to her sleeping on a bench next to a shopping cart filled with her possessions, something she has learned to do over the years.

The outreach workers at Penn Station were offering homeless people the usual limited choices, generally a bed in a group shelter. And they were getting the usual no-thank-yous. Many homeless people refuse to stay in shelters because they find them dangerous or because they have extensive rules and curfews.

One of the men rousted by the officers went up to the platform. The other went down a corridor into the commuter railroad part of the terminal and lay down again.

And Mr. de Jesús and his friends in Jamaica went no further than the entranceway at the top of the escalators leading down to the station, where they sat beside their belongings in the chilly drizzle.

Still, in other parts of the system nothing had changed. On a downtown 2 train at 149th St station in the Bronx, one sleeping man had an entire train car to himself as commuters packed into the next two cars to get away from a heavy smell. Another car had three people sleeping in it.

At 110th Street station in Manhattan, a man smoked crack on the platform in open view of two officers about 10 feet away.

On a downtown 3 train in Midtown Manhattan at 9 a.m., a man lay across four seats with a granny cart by his side, his legs resting across the knees of a woman in a black parka whose body was draped over his.

Across the…