NYC to increase services, beds for homeless

New York City Mayor Eric Adams has removed homeless people from encampments and the subway system and now he is seeking a record $171 million to fund special services for them, including 1,400 beds in shelters that offer temporary space.

"What we are announcing today is the largest investment in the city's history in support of vulnerable New Yorkers experiencing homelessness on our streets and subway," Adams said during a news conference at City Hall on Sunday.

The funding was part of Adams' $99.7 billion executive budget for the next fiscal year, which he announced Tuesday. The revised budget is almost $2 billion more than the one he announced in February, and if enacted would be the largest the history of the city.

The money for the homeless will expand the "Safe Havens" beds program begun under the previous mayor, Bill de Blasio. It provides temporary, specialized shelter beds for New Yorkers in facilities, with few regulations about who can stay in them.

The program is specifically designed for homeless people who struggle with mental health and substance-abuse issues and often resist being moved to the city's problem-plagued shelters.

While the facilities vary in size, they tend to be smaller than congregate shelters, although the mayor's office has yet to provide details.

The proposal would bring the number of beds to more than 4,000, according to city officials. Five hundred of the new Safe Haven beds were previously announced in the subway-safety plan released earlier this year.

The mayor's proposal also  would allocate $12 million in funding for an outreach effort to encourage homeless people to move off the streets and create three new drop-in centers providing medical and behavioral health services, according to the mayor's office.

The city will invest at least the same amount each year going forward, Adams said.

"This is not one and done," Adams said. "This is baseline."

The city houses more than 45,000 people in shelters, according to data from the Department of Homeless Services. While it is difficult to accurately count the number of people living unsheltered, 4,000 people are estimated to live on the streets, according to the data.

The city's most recent estimate, made in January 2021, tallied about 1,300 people sleeping in subways and about 1,100 on the streets. Many advocates consider the estimate to be an undercount.

In a statement, the Coalition for the Homeless called the plan "only a small partial step in the right direction", adding it is lacking "any real permanent housing options".

"In the absence of a comprehensive plan that has the creation of vastly more permanent affordable and supportive housing at its core and that respects the dignity of all New Yorkers without homes, these piecemeal efforts are destined to do nothing more than kick the can down the road," Dave Giffen, executive director at Coalition for the Homeless told Gothamist.

Craig Hughes, a senior social worker with the Urban Justice Center, praised the mayor's proposal to add shelter beds, but said it would do little to make up for the sweeps of homeless encampments.

"His entire homeless policy has been about getting homeless people out of sight," Hughes told The New York Times. He said what his clients really needed were private rooms as well as permanent housing placements they could access without going through the shelter system.