Why has Rochester chosen to criminalize poverty?

In recent months, city crews and police have conducted sweep after sweep in the North Clinton corridor. People were rousted without notice, belongings were seized without inventory, and no meaningful housing or shelter options were offered. Local media parroted the administration’s language, branding these encampments as “open-air drug markets” and stigmatizing people with substance-use disorders as criminals instead of neighbors in need of care.

This rhetoric and these tactics come straight from Donald Trump’s “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” executive order, issued July 24, 2025. That order pushes a false narrative that trying to survive our nation’s housing crisis inherently makes you a criminal. Let’s call it like it is: This order will cut harm-reduction services and seeks to dismantle Housing First programs.

Housing First is rooted in a simple truth: People need a safe place to live before they can address mental health, employment, or substance use. Rochester’s actions reject that truth. Over 50 people have been displaced on North Clinton alone. They are welcome nowhere: not in shelters, not in hotels, and now, not even in tents.

Monroe County shelters ban people for possessing drug paraphernalia. Hotels refuse to house people considered at risk of overdosing. These policies create a category of residents who are, by design, unshelterable. When these same people set up tents on public land, the city criminalizes them for it. This is policy-engineered homelessness.

The Rochester Police Department’s rhetoric makes the bias plain. In shutting down an alleged “open-air drug market,” an RPD official declared: “If you decide you are going to bring a tent and … pitch it on a city lot so you can be near your favorite neighborhood drug house for the weekend, you’re going to be arrested and we’re going to take your tent.”

The residents they swept on North Clinton are not weekend partiers, they are homeless. I personally meet with them, speak with them, and give them supplies on a regular basis. These are people who are left with nowhere else to go due to city and county policy.

Being unhoused with substance-use disorder is treated as a criminal act instead of the public health issue it is.

Additionally, the city fails to inform outreach workers when sweeps are occurring, making it harder—and more dangerous—for service providers to connect with clients. Outreach is safest and most effective when workers can meet people in known, stable locations, not when they have to search after a sweep has scattered them across the city.

In June 2024, the Republican-majority Supreme Court made a ruling empowering municipalities to criminalize people for sleeping outside even when there are no shelter beds available in the Grants Pass v. Johnsondecision. Rochester Grants Pass Resistance and VOCAL-NY held a rally this June for the one-year anniversary, highlighting the fact that over 150 cities passed laws to criminalize homelessness in the year since the decision.

There are now over 300 cities supporting this handcuff approach, and Rochester is one of them.

On any given night, 1,056 people in Rochester are homeless, an escalating number with rising rent and high eviction rates —nearly half of Monroe County eviction cases end with a warrant. Unsheltered homelessness here nearly doubled between 2023 and 2024 (HUD PIT 2023, HUD PIT 2024). This is not a shortage of enforcement; it is a shortage of housing.

Other cities have chosen a different path. San Jose operates sanctioned encampments with bathrooms, showers, clean water, and municipal sanitation—spaces where outreach workers can connect people to services without fear of displacement. These programs reduce harm, protect dignity, and save lives.

The New York State Constitution is clear: municipalities have a duty to provide “aid, care and support of the needy.” Rochester’s adoption of Trump’s blueprint replaces that obligation with punishment. The results are predictable: more displacement, more desperation, more death.

We could expand Housing First programs, open overdose prevention centers, and reform shelter and hotel rules so people who use drugs aren’t excluded from the very systems designed to prevent street homelessness. We could make public spaces inclusive instead of hostile.

Rochester has chosen to criminalize poverty, following Trump’s playbook to the letter. But we have an opportunity to walk a different path, to shift the narrative, and to build collaborative support systems that have been proven to work.

Mickey DiPerna is a housing justice advocate and community organizer with Rochester Grants Pass Resistance in Rochester. Their advocacy is informed by lived experience with homelessness and substance-use disorder in their family.

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