A cluster of tents and makeshift shelters has taken over the raised stone pavilion at Columbus Park in Lower Manhattan, just steps from City Hall, with residents complaining of overwhelming odors and children playing nearby as the camp grows. The encampment includes about a half-dozen tents and shelters beneath the pavilion, furnished with a couch, tables, an electrical charging station, clothing hung on railings and music playing from inside the tents, according to the New York Post.
A Pavilion Transformed, Just Blocks From City Hall
The exact date the encampment appeared is unclear, but its presence has become hard to ignore for people who use the park regularly. As reported by the New York Post, the site is accompanied by the stench of human waste and garbage, with trash spilling from the pavilion and a strong urine odor near the patio and field. Kir-el McKeon, a 30-year-old parkgoer, told the outlet he would not go up to the encampment and said he thought it should be removed because the pavilion is meant to serve as a community center.
Other neighbors echoed that frustration. Henry Schroeder, a 50-year-old resident, said New York City has limited public space, especially green space, and that it should be available to residents, adding that government regulatory bodies should act because he considers the city's current regulation very poor. Elias Bourhila, 22, said the long-term occupation of public parks affects other people's enjoyment of the space. An unidentified man at the scene, meanwhile, asked for help for homeless people, the Post's reporting noted.
311 Complaints Jumped Sharply This Year
The numbers suggest the problem has escalated. Columbus Park logged 49 reports to 311 from January through September 2026, compared with just 12 for all of 2025 — a sign of how quickly conditions around the pavilion have drawn neighbors' attention, per the same Post account.
The surge comes against the backdrop of a broader shift in how New York City handles encampment complaints. Mayor Zohran Mamdani barred the NYPD from clearing homeless encampments until Department of Homeless Services workers complete outreach rounds, and citywide encampments have flourished since that policy took hold, the Post reported. Separately, amNY reported that as of Sept. 22, homeless-encampment 311 requests are now routed to DHS rather than the NYPD, part of a policy announced in February that calls for DHS outreach teams to spend seven days at a site before any cleanup takes place.
How the New Response System Is Working
In the first two weeks under the revised approach, DHS received roughly 1,500 encampment reports and responded to callers in about four and a half hours on average, according to City Limits. NYPD and the Department of Sanitation can still assist with a sweep on the seventh day, the outlet reported, but only if a site includes a built structure in an area not designed for habitation. New York Focus has reported that DHS has conducted far fewer sweeps under Mamdani than it did under his predecessor, Eric Adams.
Citywide, the overall volume of encampment complaints has actually dipped slightly even as individual sites like Columbus Park draw more attention. After accounting for duplicate DHS and NYPD records, amNY found the city logged roughly 8,650 encampment 311 reports in the first eight months of 2026, about 7.5% fewer than the roughly 9,350 reports during the same period in 2025. Manhattan, however, accounted for more than 83% of this year's reports — roughly 7,210 of them — underscoring how concentrated the visible impact has been in the borough that includes Columbus Park.
A Larger Encampment Also Grew on the West Side
Columbus Park is not the only Manhattan site drawing scrutiny this year. A separate encampment stretched roughly 12 blocks along 11th Avenue on the West Side over the summer, from 34th Street to 46th Street, according to Fox News. The Daily Wire reported that 311 calls tied to that stretch rose from 40 in 2025 to 48 in 2026, with 28 of those calls concerning homeless people in need of help and the other 20 about the encampment itself.
The debate over how aggressively cities should clear encampments has played out well beyond New York. In San Jose, officials began clearing the long-running Columbus Park encampment there in August 2025, citing public-safety concerns, according to Governing. At the time, San Jose counted 309 people living at that site, including 11 children and 108 pets, and said its planned motel and safe-sleeping sites could accommodate 390 people, with plans to restore the park to its original use by the third quarter of 2027.
