With dramatic political developments dominating so much of the public discourse in 2024, sound bites and attention-grabbing headlines overshadowed the reality of homelessness in NYC – a year of increases without meaningful improvements. Such noise included Mayor Adams scapegoating asylum seekers and demonizing those dealing with serious mental illness to provide justification for increases in encampment sweeps, increases in involuntarily removals of individuals from streets and subways, and increases in the number of asylum seekers and other new arrivals (“new arrivals”) subjected to shelter time limits. Similarly, Governor Hochul used incidents in the subway system to increase the number of national guard and law enforcement-led outreach teams patrolling the subways. But such efforts failed to result in any meaningful change.
In fact, homelessness in New York City has been growing. In calendar year 2024, the number of New Yorkers in shelters (excluding new arrivals) increased by roughly 12 percent. This worsening crisis has been largely ignored by Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul.
Mayor Adams has frequently touted increases in the number of households exiting shelter. Certainly, the Department of Social Services (“DSS”) deserves credit for a 24 percent increase in the total number of exits (reflecting 18,629 households) from Department of Homeless Services (“DHS”) shelters, including a 22 percent increase in the use of CityFHEPS and other subsidized housing. However, the continued growth in the shelter census despite the increased exits confirms that these efforts alone are not meaningful enough to outweigh the number of longer-term New Yorkers who are falling into homelessness and entering the shelter system.
The fact remains that there simply is not enough housing in the city that is affordable to homeless and extremely low-income (“ELI”)1 New Yorkers. This reality is illustrated by the 0.39 percent vacancy rate for the lowest rent apartments, and by the fact that, in 2024, only 2,063 units of newly constructed rental housing were completed that were affordable to the city’s over 820,000 ELI households. This is why building from the bottom up is essential if we are to end continued mass homelessness.
Mayor Adams’ and Governor Hochul’s approaches to homeless individuals who sleep unsheltered in public spaces has also failed to address the underlying problems. The Mayor celebrated increases in the removal of unhoused individuals from public spaces (involuntarily or through encampment sweeps), without acknowledging that such efforts only resulted in an appalling 3 percent (or 114) of removed individuals during the first nine months of 2024 being connected to permanent housing. This means most removed people returned to the streets and subways at a time when there were approximately 4,000 vacant supportive housing units in the city.
Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul squandered a unique opportunity to build on the City’s and State’s past success of effectively eliminating chronic homelessness among veterans. Instead of utilizing that same, proven, model of providing permanent supportive housing and mental health care services for the thousands of unsheltered individuals currently in need of such, they simply doubled-down on approaches aimed at simply removing people in need from public sight. And so the revolving door between shelters, hospitals, jails, and the streets sadly continues.
The data show that Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul have failed to achieve the outcomes that New Yorkers want. And unfortunately, the current political reality and threats to Federal funding and critical programs and services mean that homeless, formerly homeless, and ELI New Yorkers are now at even greater risk. It is therefore even more imperative that the next mayor and Governor Hochul abandon the rhetoric and failed policies that have contributed to increases without meaningful improvements and instead invest in increasing housing affordable for ELI and homeless households and ensuring that unsheltered individuals with mental health needs have access to permanent supportive housing and voluntary mental health care and other services.
Over the past five years, New York City’s housing and homelessness crisis has been complicated by a series of factors that have significantly impacted the shelter census, government policies, and almost every aspect of the pre-existing systems in place to address it.
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in a significant, albeit temporary and artificial, decline in the NYC shelter census.2 But when pandemic-era eviction protections expired in 2022, the number of people sleeping in shelters again began to climb.3 This increase in homelessness was almost immediately overshadowed by the rapid and dramatic surge in the number of new arrivals immigrating to New York City and in need of temporary shelter and services.
As a result of both the increase in local homelessness and the influx of new arrivals, the total number of people sleeping each night in NYC shelters grew by 142 percent (more than 79,000 people) between March 2022, when 55,702 people slept in NYC shelters, and January 2024, when the census hit an all-time high of 134,963.
While the number of new arrivals in the shelter system remained high, it declined steadily throughout 2024, falling by 25 percent over the course of the year. This occurred for various reasons,4 including federal actions resulting in fewer new entrants seeking asylum, such as the threshold that triggered temporary closure of the border,5 and restrictions imposed by Mayor Adams on how long new arrivals can remain in a shelter placement.6 But no evidence suggests that those who left the shelter system were able to get the help they needed to obtain housing, employment, and stability.7
In fact, the City and State failed to implement the type of robust reception and relocation system that the Coalition for the Homeless along with numerous advocates, business leaders, and faith communities strongly urged Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams to fund and implement throughout 2024.8 Therefore, only the limited State Migrant Relocation Assistance Program and the City’s solely financial asylum moveout assistance effort were available, and these resources were limited to families with children. As a result, by January 2025, only 1,400 new arrival households (fewer than 5,000 individuals) had exited shelter with any kind of City- or State-supported relocation assistance. This means that out of the approximately 190,000 new arrivals who left the shelter system between March 2022 and January 2025,9 more than 97 percent (about 185,000 people) did so with no programmatic relocation support of any kind.10
While so much of the public dialogue has (understandably) been centered around the needs of the new arrival population, far too little attention has been paid to the rapidly increasing number of longer-term New Yorkers sleeping in shelters each night, which grew from 65,640 in December 2023 to 73,219 in December 2024, representing a one-year increase of 11.5 percent.
For the foregoing reasons, State of the Homeless 2025 focuses primarily on two broad topics:
Each of these concerns stem from the same core systemic failure: the lack of affordable housing for those who need it most.
None of the other attendant problems can be solved without housing. Until we create enough affordable housing that is targeted to homeless and ELI households and that includes adequate units to meet the accessibility needs of those with various disabilities, the shelter census will continue to increase. People will continue to sleep on the streets and in the subways. The mental health care needs of those sleeping unsheltered will go unaddressed. The City will continue to waste time, effort, and money on ineffective and dehumanizing sweeps and involuntary hospitalizations. It’s time to stop simply oiling the hinges on the revolving door between the streets, shelters, jails, and hospitals, and instead invest in a more rational and coordinated approach that results in health, housing, and stability.
All New Yorkers want to see an end to mass homelessness. It is certainly within the power of the Mayor and Governor to establish policies and priorities that will put us on that path.
Homelessness in New York City continues to worsen. The most useful way to measure and track the scope of the crisis is by examining the average nightly census of the municipal shelter system, since New York’s Right to Shelter obligates the City, through DHS, to ensure that enough beds are available in their system as more people become homeless and require shelter. While this particular shelter census figure does not include individuals in shelters that are not operated by DHS,11 nor the thousands of people sleeping unsheltered in public spaces each night, nor the hundreds of thousands of people without homes who are temporarily sleeping on the floors or couches of others, accurate figures do not exist for the latter two populations. As such, the census for DHS shelters and those operated by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (“HPD”) – which the Coalition has monitored for more than 40 years – functions as a useful proxy for tracking the state of mass homelessness in New York City.
Tracking the number of longer-term New Yorkers in shelters became more complicated after the new arrival population began increasing rapidly in March 2022, as the City did not begin disaggregating the census data into new arrivals and longer-term New Yorkers until July 2023. However, it is possible to compare the number of longer-term New Yorkers in shelters before March 2022 with current numbers, to get a sense of how much “home-grown” homelessness has worsened in NYC.
In the three-year period from December 2021 to December 2024, the number of longer-term New Yorkers in shelters increased by 17,793 people, or by more than 32 percent. And, as noted above, 2024 alone saw the number of longer-term New Yorkers in shelters increase by more than 7,500 people, or 11.5 percent. By the beginning of 2024, the number of longer-term New Yorkers in DHS and HPD shelters alone roughly matched the historical high it reached in December 2019 of approximately 63,000 people.12
What makes these figures more alarming is the fact that in FY2024 DSS made some progress helping more households exit shelters into permanent housing (meaning that without such efforts, the shelter census would have been even higher). But, such efforts, while commendable, simply were not at the scale necessary to keep up with the number of people becoming homeless and entering shelters. For the shelter census to come down, more families and individuals must get the help they need to avoid becoming homeless, and more investments are required to address two primary obstacles to increasing shelter exits into permanent housing: 1) lack of affordable housing supply for homeless and ELI households, and 2) numerous barriers restricting access to existing affordable housing.
Before elaborating on these two areas, it is important to examine both the drivers of the current state of homelessness and the exits that the City facilitated in 2024.
According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s 2025 report, “The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes,” for every 100 ELI households in New York State, there are merely 36 affordable and available rental units.13 The worsening housing precarity is evidenced by the growing rent burdens borne by these residents. Seventy-three percent of NYC’s roughly 820,000 ELI households are severely rent-burdened, spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing.14
This financial strain severely limits the capacity of ELI households to afford other necessities, such as food, healthcare, and childcare, and leaves hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers teetering on the verge of homelessness.
Such rent burdens exist largely because the supply of housing affordable to the lowest income households is essentially non-existent. The most recent Housing Vacancy Survey states that the vacancy rate for rent stabilized units was less than 1 percent in 2023 – down from an already distressingly low 4.6 percent in 2021.15 More to the point, the vacancy rate for apartments renting for less than $1,100 per month was only 0.39 percent. Effectively, there are no affordable apartments left in New York City for those who need them most.16
To further put this in perspective, there were only 4,442 vacant units affordable to the more than half-million households earning less than $50,000 per year and even fewer vacant units for families and individuals receiving public assistance who are at risk of entering and remaining in shelter.
According to the State Comptroller’s Office, the New York State Unified Court System recorded 191,230 eviction filings statewide in 2024.17 The increase in evictions is particularly affecting low-income residents and communities of color and further straining the city’s social safety net.
In New York City, the number of marshal-executed residential evictions and possessions has been rapidly escalating, well exceeding 15,000 in 2024.
According to the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition, there have been more than 29,000 residential evictions by court-ordered marshals since the pandemic era protections put in place in 2020 ended in January 2022.18
“Eviction” in court or by landlords or prime tenants in the absence of court cases was in fact the second-most common answer given as “reason for homelessness” by families with children entering the DHS shelter system in FY2024 (with “Domestic Violence” being the most common reason).
Notably, “Overcrowding” was the third-most common reason for homelessness among families with children. As nearly a quarter (23 percent) of New York City households with at least one child are overcrowded,19 and the city has more than 170,000 households living with more than 1.5 people per room20 – conditions that are frequently a precursor to homelessness – such statistics portend greater levels of mass homelessness if the City and State do not invest in more housing affordable for these households.
Overcrowding and the discord it creates is a leading precipitating factor of shelter stays among single adults as well: nearly 40 percent of single adults reported either “Overcrowding,” “Discord,” or “Unlivable conditions” as their reason for entering DHS shelters in FY2024.
Also notable from Figure 2.5 above is that nearly 10 percent of single adults entered the shelter system directly from other institutions or systems. These are individuals who should have received effective interventions by those institutions to avoid homelessness. However, the DHS shelter system continues to serve as a de facto “catch-all,” providing an alternative to sleeping on the streets for all those whom these institutions and systems continue to fail including state prisons, jails, medical and psychiatric hospitals, foster care, and other shelters.
For years, New York State has failed to provide adequate discharge planning for those exiting State prisons, instead relying on New York City’s Right to Shelter to pick up the slack and pushing more costs onto the City. As a result, roughly 43 percent of those discharged from State prisons continue to be sent to NYC shelters.
The analysis in last year’s State of the Homeless can unfortunately be repeated:
This trend is not merely a byproduct of systemic inefficiency; rather, it reflects deep-seated issues within the State’s reentry planning and both the City’s and State’s failure to provide access to affordable housing. While the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision asserts that it is making efforts to place individuals in alternative housing arrangements, the high percentage of those ending up in shelters over the past decade is telling. Even so, beyond straining the shelter system, the government’s chronic neglect in providing needed reentry planning has left many without supports in rebuilding their lives after incarceration, often resulting in extended periods within the shelter system and making it harder for formerly incarcerated people to gain employment, care for their physical and mental health, and complete parole supervision. This failure of policy and compassion significantly impacts Black and Latino New Yorkers, who each make up a disproportionate share of both the prison system and the shelter population. As it stands, the State’s inadequate discharge practices largely serve to reinforce the cycle of disadvantage and systemic bias that pervade our society.
This trend is not merely a byproduct of systemic inefficiency; rather, it reflects deep-seated issues within the State’s reentry planning and both the City’s and State’s failure to provide access to affordable housing. While the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision asserts that it is making efforts to place individuals in alternative housing arrangements, the high percentage of those ending up in shelters over the past decade is telling.
Even so, beyond straining the shelter system, the government’s chronic neglect in providing needed reentry planning has left many without supports in rebuilding their lives after incarceration, often resulting in extended periods within the shelter system and making it harder for formerly incarcerated people to gain employment, care for their physical and mental health, and complete parole supervision. This failure of policy and compassion significantly impacts Black and Latino New Yorkers, who each make up a disproportionate share of both the prison system and the shelter population. As it stands, the State’s inadequate discharge practices largely serve to reinforce the cycle of disadvantage and systemic bias that pervade our society.
The nightly shelter census has continued to grow even as the City has made some progress in increasing the number of subsidized exits from shelters. Subsidized shelter exits, whether involving rent vouchers, supportive housing, set-aside units, or New York City Housing Authority (“NYCHA”) units, are far more likely to lead to long-term stability for the household, and less likely to result in a return to the shelter system.
As seen in Figure 2.8 above, in FY2024 fewer than one percent of adult families and families with children, and less than four percent of single adults, return to the shelter system when it was a subsidized exit. The rates in previous years were not materially different.
As illustrated in Figure 2.9, recent efforts by DSS to better utilize CityFHEPS vouchers to help households move out of shelters has resulted in a marked increase in subsidized exits. The progress, while welcome, is unfortunately still not at the scale needed to counter the number of people becoming homeless and entering the shelter system. Like placements into supportive housing, set-asides, and NYCHA, exits via CityFHEPS are constrained by housing supply and the many barriers to access.
Single adult shelter exits into supportive housing have increased steadily since hitting a low of 1,228 in FY2021, returning to roughly pre-pandemic levels. While we are pleased to see exits into supportive housing increasing, the number has yet to make up for the nearly steady seven-year decline from 2014 to 2021.21
“Set-asides” are housing units reserved specifically for homeless households.22 Some homeless households also also exit shelters into units that landlords have elected to make available, referred to as “Voluntary Homeless Preference“ units. Placements into these units, and into 421a and remarketing units, are shown in figure 2.11 below.
Again, while there is a welcome increase in the number of households being placed into set-asides, voluntary homeless preference units, and similar designated units, the increasing shelter census indicates that neither the preventative nor rehousing solutions are being implemented at the necessary scale.
As the city’s largest source of permanent affordable housing, public housing administered by NYCHA has long been an important source of housing for formerly homeless households. However, as Figure 2.12 illustrates, the City has been failing to utilize this critical resource, and the number of individuals who moved into NYCHA housing has continued to decline to the lowest levels in recent memory: in FY2024, only 510 households were placed into NYCHA units. Yet, there are over 5,000 apartments sitting empty that should be filled with households currently living in shelter.23 The City should sufficiently fund the Vacant Unit Readiness Program and eliminate the long turn-around times to re-lease NYCHA units after the prior tenant vacates.
The primary reason for ongoing mass homelessness in New York and the main obstacle to moving people out of shelters and off the streets is the lack of affordable and supportive housing. Without adequate supply – and specifically, supply that is targeted to homeless and ELI households – the situation will not improve. But increasing supply alone will not be sufficient if existing barriers to available units are not addressed. These limitations on voucher and housing eligibility, needless administrative obstacles, and the lack of skilled shelter staff able to assist individuals with their housing search.
As noted above, New York City’s vacancy rate for apartments renting for under $1,100 per month is less than 0.4 percent, and the overall vacancy rate is 1.4 percent – the lowest it has been since the city began measuring it in 1968.24 Rapidly increasing rent levels, wages that are not keeping pace with inflation and housing costs, and increasing population25 are all contributing to a worsening shortage in affordable housing – especially for those at the bottom of the economic ladder.
The City’s sole plan for addressing the shortage of affordable housing in New York is the “City of Yes” plan. As stated in last year’s State of the Homeless, this plan does not include any requirements for deep affordability and will likely have no impact on New York’s homelessness crisis even with the modifications secured by the City Council. As illustrated below, the City’s affordable housing investments have disproportionately benefited those who are moderate or middle income (i.e., those with incomes amounting to 80 percent of AMI or above, which in 2024 would mean an annual income of no less than $86,960 for a household of one or $111,840 for a household of three).
Building more market rate housing or encouraging the creation of more “affordable” housing for those earning 80 percent – or even 120 percent – of AMI will do nothing for the tens of thousands of people in NYC sleeping in shelters or on the streets, or the hundreds of thousands of doubled-up and precariously housed ELI New Yorkers. Trickle-down housing strategies do not work.
To begin to finally end mass homeless, the City should be financing at least 12,000 units of affordable housing per year for five years, targeted specifically to homeless and ELI households. As shown below, the City has yet to invest in housing for ELI households at such levels, which accounts for the small number of affordable ELI units completed year after year as shown in Figure 3.1 above. This will not change without intentional efforts undertaken now, especially since it will take years before those investments materialize into units that are ready for occupancy.
Supportive housing for homeless individuals with mental illness and other disabilities is not only proven to provide long-term stability for the individuals housed, but increases property values in the neighborhoods where it is built, and saves taxpayers approximately $10,000 per year in averted costs for shelters, emergency rooms, justice involvement, and other government agencies and services. However, there is currently only about one available supportive housing unit for every five people deemed eligible. As shown in Figure 3.3, the City completed only 786 supportive housing units in FY2024 – the lowest number since FY2020.
In 2015, the City had committed to creating 15,000 supportive housing units by 2030 under the NY 15/15 program, but by the end of FY2024 had completed only 3,853 of those units.26 While the number of supportive housing units started has increased in each of the past three years, the City must award contracts for all of the outstanding units by 2028, and should conduct annual assessments of need to ensure that there are always sufficient numbers of supportive units in the pipeline. Furthermore, the City should conduct any and all necessary repairs and renovations on any and all vacant and offline supportive housing units so that they can be configured appropriately to meet the needs of, and be available to, the homeless New Yorkers most in need of supportive housing placements.
The State similarly should undertake the necessary steps to rectify the delay in the 20,000 units of supportive housing statewide that Governor Cuomo had promised by 2030.27 According to the Supportive Housing Network of New York,28 only 8,400 of these units had received permanent awards by April 2024 and, of those, only 5,444 units had opened. In other words, roughly two-thirds of the way into the timeline, only 27 percent of the target had been reached.
As noted above, the data in the Mayor’s Management Report on the number of set-aside units financed and completed each year are inclusive of the supportive housing numbers. Figure 3.4 shows the number of set-aside units other than supportive housing units completed and financed each year.
The number of set-aside units completed in FY2024 was roughly the same as in the previous year, and while the numbers are improved over the pandemic-era lows, they have not yet caught up to pre-pandemic levels. The number of set-aside units started has been increasing, however, and hit a high of 1,930 in FY2024. But it will take some time before NYC realizes the benefits of these increased investments.
Given that CityFHEPS vouchers have proven to be one of the more effective tools for moving homeless households into housing and stability, there is broad agreement that their use should be expanded to help more homeless and at-risk New Yorkers. In 2023, the City Council passed four laws to expand eligibility criteria and make other fixes to the program.29
But even though the four laws were passed, Mayor Adams has refused to implement any of the reforms other than elimination of the 90-day shelter requirement and the City is now engaged in protracted litigation with no end date in sight. Meanwhile, this restriction on CityFHEPS eligibility further contributes to a rising NYC shelter census.
This situation is further exacerbated by the unnecessary delays and hurdles that plague every step of the CityFHEPS process. Clients of the Coalition experience extended delays in processing their applications for CityFHEPS, approvals of apartments, and payments to landlords. For instance, one of our multiply-disabled adult family clients found an apartment that was accessible for them. But securing approval to use their CityFHEPS voucher for the apartment and moving in required our staff to make dozens of phone calls and send numerous emails to DHS administrators and rehousing staff over eight long months. Such extended effort was necessary in this and many other cases because of high staff turnover and lack of staff training at the shelters, communication challenges between different agencies, and a systemic inability within the shelter system to prioritize client move-outs and engage in problem solving when complications arise.
Formerly homeless families and individuals rehoused with CityFHEPS vouchers and households who used the vouchers to avoid eviction also face significant challenges with recertification, the conditions of their units, and other issues that threaten their tenancies. Homebase, the Human Resources Administration (“HRA”) program that provides homelessness prevention services throughout the city, is so overwhelmed with the many needs of tenants in housing court that their role as the only aftercare provider to CityFHEPS recipients often leads to missed opportunities and crises for people facing homelessness. The Coalition recently helped two households who, despite being eligible for CityFHEPS, were evicted from their homes and entered the shelter system simply because they could not get an appointment with Homebase. (The Coalition was able to quickly intervene and access the resources needed to get both families back in their homes.)
These examples reflect a broken and dysfunctional system that needlessly traumatizes people and wastes resources.30
Addressing the problems with CityFHEPS alone will of course not solve mass homelessness. The DSS Commissioner noted in testimony to the City Council that as of January 20, 2025, there were more than 11,000 households in the DHS shelter system with CityFHEPS shopping letters (the document that allows someone to start looking for an apartment). Unless the City invests in creating more permanent housing for homeless and ELI households, this backlog will only continue to grow.31
So many NYC households require rent vouchers because the public assistance rent allowance, set by the State, is at a level far below actual rents in New York.32 Governor Hochul must address this critical flaw. The State’s FHEPS program, which is designed to bridge that gap, could and should play a much larger role in reducing the number of people in shelters, but its narrow entitlement eligibility requirement excludes all single adults and adult families as well as most families with minor children (who either have not been sued in eviction proceedings in Housing Court, or have not been evicted in a Housing Court proceeding and subsequently entered DHS shelter within 12 months of applying).
It is the State’s responsibility to correct this problem, which impacts tens of thousands of homeless and at-risk New Yorkers. Broadening eligibility for the State’s FHEPS voucher, or more to the point, increasing the public assistance rent allowance to fair market rent (“FMR”) levels, would significantly reduce the need for emergency shelters in New York.
Due to the high demand and limited number of vouchers available, the waitlist for Section 8 vouchers had been closed since 2009. Fortunately, in 2024 NYCHA reopened the waitlist. However, only 1,200 places on the waitlist were currently set aside for people sleeping in DHS shelters – a figure that is far too low given the scale of homelessness in New York City. More New Yorkers who are in the greatest need should be given priority for this invaluable tool, and the number of places on the waitlist for homeless households should be increased to 3,000.
The future of Section 8 voucher funding broadly remains to be seen. Already, the Federal government has decided to no longer fund the Emergency Housing Voucher program across the country. Given the City’s 7,581 leased vouchers,33 housing precarity and homelessness will likely increase in the year ahead, requiring the City and State to maximize all available resources, including Section 8 vouchers, to ensure fewer individuals end up on the street.
The Coalition has long documented the difficulties that many homeless individuals with disabilties and mental health conditions encounter when attempting to establish eligibility for supportive housing with the Placement Assessment and Client Tracking (“PACT”) unit at HRA. They are subjected to lengthy and complex application processes laden with unnecessary documentation that result in the continued disenfranchisement of those whom supportive housing providers aim to serve. Supportive housing applicants are given no agency in the application process, as all documentation and every step of the process must go through an approved provider. High turnover rates and shortages in knowledgeable shelter staff intensify these challenges, making it difficult for shelter residents to get the help they need to navigate the cumbersome and opaque supportive housing application process.
In addition, there is no official, impartial process for a supportive housing applicant wishing to challenge a negative eligibility determination, and nothing documented on the eligibility decision (or anywhere else) instructing an applicant how to appeal. While some advocates are knowledgeable enough to know that they can contact a PACT reviewer to dispute a negative determination, ad hoc advocacy cannot be expected to address a systemic problem.
Further adding to these concerns are the reported plans by the State Office of Mental Health (“OMH”) and HRA to change the supportive housing approval categories to create a more binary approach: applicants would be eligible either for licensed or for unlicensed housing, based on the assessed severity of their mental health needs by individuals who do not meet, or have any meaningful contact, with the applicant. As such, applicants who could be eligible for both categories will no longer be able to access both licensed and unlicensed units to find an apartment that best meets their needs.34 Accordingly, more individuals may find themselves unable to access housing that meets their needs.35
Overcoming eligibility hurdles is just part of the challenge. Administrative bottlenecks and chronic underfunding hamper effective operation and service delivery within supportive housing frameworks. Persistent barriers, such as referral processes that do not account for the various accessibility needs of individuals, inaccessible interview locations, and mismatched eligibility assessments serve to exacerbate the gap between the availability of supportive placements and the swelling demand. The processes lack transparency and do not empower individuals involved to participate actively in decisions about their living arrangements. As the Coalition and Legal Aid Society pointed out more than four years ago in testimony before the City Council Committee on General Welfare:36
Applicants must undergo an interview with a supportive housing provider, where experiences vary widely. There is no central oversight to ensure consistent best practices among housing providers – a negative byproduct of having multiple sources of government funding and regulations for supportive housing. This inconsistency is extremely challenging for many applicants. For example, although homeless applicants have already submitted extensive documentation with their 2010e applications, some supportive housing providers ask them to submit additional materials. We have also encountered examples of providers violating local laws in refusing to provide translation services and, in some cases, refusing to consider a client for a particular housing development because the provider does not want to secure language access for the client. . . . Matching applicants to units that can accommodate their disabling conditions has been problematic, and the evaluation requirements often do not take into consideration the applicant’s physical disabilities. Because of inconsistencies between providers, applicants are often left confused, overwhelmed, and unprepared for the interview process.
Accordingly, as shown in Figure 3.5, less than 25 percent of eligible households are accepted into supportive housing.
In FY2024, there were 146 DHS and DHS-contracted shelters (69 percent of 211 shelters) that had zero supportive housing applications approved (or a number so low that it could not be reported for concern of identifying a specific individual) – far more than the 65 shelters (31 percent of the total) that had more than five households accepted into supportive housing.37 Those are even worse numbers than in the previous year, when 115 shelters had zero applications approved (or a number so low that it could not be reported).
Concerns about unhoused individuals with perceived serious mental illness (“SMI”) in the transit system have dominated much of the public discourse regarding homelessness in NYC, driven largely by headlines in the tabloids. Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul, in their efforts to increase subway ridership, have responded by framing this as an issue of public safety and law enforcement, instead of as a tragic failure of our mental health and housing systems that leave thousands of people in our city without the help they want and need. As a result, every level of engagement and assistance for these individuals is under-resourced, poorly designed, or misdirected.
These failures extend to individuals with mental health conditions in the shelter system, explaining in part why so many end up bedding down in public spaces until they find some way of securing permanent housing and mental health care that meets their needs.
Since Mayor Adams took office, he has been laser-focused on removing unhoused New Yorkers from the streets and subways without any real plan to address their needs. Invoking rhetoric characterizing them as criminals, he has doubled down on using law enforcement to temporarily extract these New Yorkers from public view, conducting approximately 2,300 encampment sweeps from January to September 202438 and thousands of involuntary removals of individuals experiencing SMI in 2024.39
City data shows that of the nearly 3,600 individuals impacted by encampment sweeps, only 114 were placed into shelters and none were placed into permanent or supportive housing.40 But because the City fails to adequately track the outcomes of the involuntary removals conducted, it is not clear how many individuals with SMI were transported, how many of them were actually admitted to the hospital, and what happened to them after leaving the hospital.41 The only thing we can surmise is that targeted individuals are further traumatized, do not get the treatment they need, and eventually return to the very places from which they were removed.
In each of Mayor Adams’ and Governor Hochul’s approaches, the consistent theme has been to increase police involvement in lieu of investing in permanent supportive housing and adequate voluntary and community-based mental health care. The more than $3.6 million spent by the City in 2024 alone in connection with sweeps ($1 million of which was for NYPD)42 could have instead enabled the City to house more than the 175 of the 955 unsheltered people who had been approved for supportive housing during just a few months of 2024.43
Given what New Yorkers observe on the streets and subways, one may be surprised that the City and State launched numerous programs targeted to unsheltered individuals experiencing SMI, several of which include, or are connected with, NYPD. However, despite their apparent prevalence, there is limited data available regarding the effectiveness of this alphabet soup of outreach groups, some of which are outlined in the table below. What is known is that many of them – such as the IMT and ACT teams – are underfunded and thus hampered by extensive waitlists, impacting even those who seek assistance voluntarily.44 Other efforts are misguided in their approach, and none of them effectively place individuals without homes into permanent housing that meets their needs – which is the only way to end the inhumane and ineffective revolving door between subways, shelters, hospitals, jails, and the streets.
Taken together, this suggests that the City and State should cease promulgating more outreach programs, especially those utilizing law enforcement, and instead focus on housing placements, on necessary modifications to make these services more effective in achieving their intended goals, and on improved data tracking and evaluation of existing programs to inform future funding.
While placement into permanent supportive housing with adequate and appropriate mental health care services is always the desired outcome, there are indeed some individuals who first need psychiatric hospitalization due to the severity of their illness. But the State has failed to ensure that there are enough psychiatric beds to meet the need. In fact, there were fewer inpatient psychiatric beds at the end of FY2024 than there were in 2014.45 The 2023-2024 State Budget included funding for 150 new psychiatric beds, but only two of those beds are in New York City.
Further, even though the 2024-2025 Budget provided an additional 200 State-operated psychiatric beds, as of early 2025 only 125 had opened throughout the state, of which in NYC, 25 are for homeless individuals with SMI who also have a substance use disorder and 25 are for individuals with SMI from Rikers or other city jails.46 Many more beds are required in NYC to address current needs even before the expansion of involuntary removal pushed by Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams in 2025.47
Individuals with SMI in shelters similarly experience the City’s and State’s failures at providing the services that meet their needs. And more broadly speaking, emergency shelters are not adequate settings for people with SMI, who need permanent housing and access to mental health care.
Some of the challenges exist at the outset as people with apparent psychiatric and/or cognitive needs often experience difficulty accessing shelter. Adult families in particular have higher rates of mental health issues, disabilities, and other medical needs. Therefore, the complex shelter eligibility process is inaccessible and poses a significant challenge.48
As illustrated in the following chart – and consistent with the historic lows of the past two years – an appallingly low 22 percent of adult families were found eligible for shelter.
But even this number fails to tell the full story, because many of those found eligible had to submit multiple applications before receiving such determination. As illustrated in Figure 4.2 below, hundreds of applications are submitted each month for shelter, yet relatively few people are successful. What the chart is unable to show is that, in more cases than not, those who were successful in one particular month filed applications months before eventually being approved. For instance, in December 2024, 17 percent of adult families found eligible had to submit six or more applications over the course of multiple months before being approved.
Put simply, the system for determining shelter eligibility for adult families is broken and does not meet the needs of the population it is designed to serve – and, as a result, people in need of shelter are systematically being turned back out onto the streets.
But even if individuals are able to navigate these challenges, their needs are not being identified during shelter intake and assessment, despite the City’s current screening tools. And even in the case where their needs are identified, many remain unaddressed – regardless of an individual’s placement in one of the approximately 40 “mental health shelters.”49 This is partly related to the fact that these facilities are often congregate shelters, the configuration and operation of which are known to trigger or exacerbate pre-existing psychiatric symptoms. In addition, the City often fails to properly assess, approve, and fulfill reasonable accommodations (“RAs”) for these individuals.50
Further, our work with numerous shelter residents has illustrated that these facilities often:
Placement in Safe Havens and stabilization beds (“low-barrier shelters”) is far preferable to placement in the larger congregate facilities, even those characterized as mental health shelters which often fail to provide the needed level of mental health care services. However, the number of low–barrier shelter beds, which are available for various unsheltered homeless individuals in addition to those experiencing SMI, is far below what is needed. In fact, the approximately 4,000 beds currently existing are consistently full. The City has been slowly increasing the number of low-barrier shelter beds, and the Mayor recently announced adding 900 more such beds,52 but even so, the number remains far short of what is needed.
The Federally-mandated annual HOPE estimate conducted by the City captures only a portion of the number of people sleeping unsheltered in NYC due to its flawed methodology.53 But comparing even that underestimate with the number of vacant low-barrier shelter beds illustrates how far short the City is falling.
Setting aside the deficiency in numbers, in September 2024, the City adopted a new policy establishing that only individuals with certain immigration status and documented health conditions and periods of living unsheltered will be eligible for these low-barrier beds.54 If upheld by the court,55 this policy has the effect of relegating many individuals, particularly those experiencing SMI, to the streets and subways where they will be further subjected to trauma, criminalization, and involuntary treatment.
Instead of doubling down on involuntary removals, encampment sweeps, and both shelter practices and housing policies that continue to fail all New Yorkers, it is time the City and State adopted the evidenced-based solutions we have proposed, which, include the following.
