Dear John,

The city that never sleeps shouldn't have our most vulnerable New Yorkers sleeping on the streets or subways.

That’s why today, I unveiled a blueprint to end street homelessness for people with serious mental illness with a "Housing First" approach.

Housing First combines existing housing vouchers and service dollars to get people off the street and directly into stable housing with wraparound services. This model was already piloted with New York City veterans and tested in major U.S. cities. By breaking down the barriers to accessing a stable place to be treated, Housing First has been proven to work seventy to ninety percent of the time. 

This tried and tested solution can effectively end street homelessness for the 2,000 people with serious mental illness cycling through New York City subways, streets, hospitals, and jails.

We’ve all seen the news. A series of high-profile, random, and tragic acts of violence involving people living on the streets and subways has brought this issue to the forefront of the safety discussion. Yet the Adams Administration has failed to effectively coordinate a continuum of care.

Outreach teams lose track of clients, hospitals release patients back to the street when inpatient beds are full, judges cannot refer people to alternative programs to incarceration that have no slots, and jails discharge only a tiny percentage of the people with serious mental illness into supportive housing.

Despite a renewed focus from City and State leaders on the intersection of street homelessness and serious mental illness, and the billions of dollars spent on outreach, police overtime, city jails, shelters, and emergency hospitalization, City Hall has continuously failed to coordinate these efforts effectively to solve the problem.  

In 2023, my office released an audit that found the Adams’ Administration’s homeless encampment sweeps connected just three out of the 2,308 people removed to permanent housing. Another audit from my office found the percentage of clients able to retain stable housing in the City’s Intensive Mobile Treatment program dropped from 44% to 37% over a 21-month period and available data indicates that just 25% of qualified people discharged from State Psychiatric Centers, transitional living residences, hospitals, and treatment programs were accepted in supportive housing.  

In other words, this ‘housing last’ mindset is making all New Yorkers less safe.

The new report estimates that there are approximately 2,000 people with serious mental illness who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness, or currently in City hospitals or jails who are likely to return to the street upon discharge. Meanwhile, there are over 2,500 units of supportive housing sitting vacant – more than enough to house the vast majority of seriously mentally ill New Yorkers currently sleeping on the street. 

With a ‘housing first’ approach that has been shown to work up to 90% of the time to keep people stably housed, with more effective mandated options for those cases when it doesn’t work, and with better management from City Hall, we can end the crisis of street homelessness for seriously mentally ill people in New York City

Public safety – whether you ride the subway every day or sleep on the subway to stay out of the cold – matters to us all. In a city with eight million people and incredible resources, we should not only aspire to, but be able to achieve, a goal of having no one with a mental illness living on the streets. 

Brad

Office of the New York City Comptroller

Our mailing address is:
Office of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander
1 Centre Street
New York, NY 10007
United States

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