Mamdani admin makes half-hearted attempt to clean up embarassing NYC homeless encampment

Not good enough.

Big Apple outreach workers finally showed up at the lawless shantytown that has thrived near the Intrepid Museum — but barely put a dent in the ongoing encampment that turned the West Side into skid row.

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Despite days of local complaints and repeated reports by The Post, most of the tents and makeshift shelters that have irritated locals in the shadow of the popular floating museum remained in place Wednesday, with city outreach workers doing little more than picking up some trash.

A dumpster on West 45th Street is filled with remnants of the grimy encampment — bags of needles, sex toys, cigarette butts and empty food containers next to Amazon bags stuffed with junk.

But much of the 12-block encampment remains in place.

Sources said on Wednesday that Mayor Zohran Mamdani is “freaking out” over the unsightly tent city and “scrambling” to address the mess that has become an embarrassment for City Hall.

But publicly, the mayor has appeared to shrug off the situation, telling reporters on Monday that he would “look into” the putrid encampment while it continued to grow.

Mamdani’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Critics said it was Mamdani who let the situation get out of control in the first place.

The mayor’s hands-off approach to the homeless crisis bans the NYPD from tearing down homeless encampments until outreach and homeless services staffers are dispatched to the scene — and then cops have to wait for seven days before they can act under the policy.

The order to intervene in the West Side encampment only came on Tuesday, five days after The Post sounded the alarm about trash-strewn shantytown that has the neighborhood up in arms, sources said.

Some sidewalk squatters even tapped into city utility poles to steal electricity for their makeshift shelters, forcing cops to step in at least twice on Tuesday to unplug the vagrants.

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“I was on the ground for a few hours and what I witnessed was awful,” state attorney general candidate Saritha Komatireddy, who visted the encampment this week, said on X.

“Businesses struggling, public spaces overtaken by disorder, and people living in dangerous conditions while government fails to act,” she wrote.

Meanwhile, former NYPD Commissioner William Bratton told The Post this week that the unruly encampment harkened back to the days when the city was overrun with vagrants.

“Remember the squeegee men at every entrance to the city? Remember the rampant street prostitution and graffiti? Remember the 8,000 open air drug selling locations? Remember the rampant subway fare evasion?” Bratton said. “I remember, and it’s happening again.

One of the illegal sidewalk campers told The Post Wednesday that most of the folks shacking up in the encampment just want to be left alone — and picked the lightly traveled stretch to stay out of sight.

“This is actually a place where we get away from the spotlight where everybody is looking at us all the time….like being in the shadows,” the 42-year-old vagrant said.

“That’s all this place is for,” he said. “Where we don’t have people watching and like just staring at us.”

The West Side stretch is largely a commercial and industrial area, bordered by the Jacob Javits Center on 34th Street and the Intrepid Museum on 46th Street.

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Additional reporting by Carl Campanile