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Homeless New Yorkers’ healthcare costs plummeted after getting housed, study finds
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Nov 12, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. ET
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Spencer Platt/Getty Images
By
Caroline Lewis
Published Nov 12, 2026 at 10:00 a.m. ET
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An NYC Health and Hospitals initiative to help homeless patients find housing is paying off in the form of fewer emergency department visits and lower Medicaid costs, according to a new study by the public hospital system and its insurance subsidiary, MetroHealthPlus.
The study tracked Medicaid claims for 259 New Yorkers who received help finding apartments or supportive housing from NYC Health and Hospitals. Their healthcare costs dropped by an average of nearly $17,000 per person in the first two years after getting housed as they visited the ER and got admitted to the hospital less frequently, according to the study, conducted with the Wakely Consulting Group.
At the same time, the group’s spending on doctors’ visits and other non-emergency services such as substance use treatment increased, suggesting they were getting more preventive care.
The small study adds to a growing body of evidence suggesting that housing can help reduce emergency healthcare spending and utilization among people who were homeless, and comes as the city’s public hospital system continues to expand its housing efforts.
Under the Housing for Health Initiative, started by the Adams administration, the hospital system has been helping patients find permanent housing, while also using its land to build supportive housing developments and creating new transitional housing options for people leaving inpatient hospital stays who have nowhere to go.
“We have to think about our robust patient population that experiences homelessness,” said Leora Jontef, who leads NYC Health and Hospitals’ Housing for Health initiative. “This patient population is sicker than housed New Yorkers.”
NYC Health and Hospitals serves more than 60,000 patients a year who are homeless or unstably housed and many of them are what those in the healthcare field refer to as ‘frequent flyers’ — patients who visit the emergency department or get admitted for inpatient care over and over.
Among the study cohort, emergency department visits declined by about 40% in the first two years after getting housing placements, while inpatient stays dropped 36%.
The average number of days study participants spent in the hospital each year also got cut in half, dropping from an average of 10 days before finding housing to five days after being placed.
The biggest savings came from the decline in spending on inpatient care, which dropped from a monthly average of $1,278 per person before finding a housing placement to $492 during the first year of being housed.
The study also compared the cohort of newly housed patients with a group of New Yorkers enrolled in MetroHealthPlus who started out with similarly high levels of healthcare spending and utilization but remained homeless. Over time, healthcare costs for the group that received housing dropped below the group that did not.
However, healthcare spending among those that got housed was not lower than the broader homeless population enrolled in MetroHealthPlus overall, the study found.
Tagged
Health and Science
healthcare
housing
new york city
Caroline Lewis
Caroline Lewis is on the health care beat for WNYC and Gothamist. She has covered COVID, a nurses' strike, the overdose crisis and New York’s marijuana legalization effort, and spent a year investigating patients' medical bills. She always wants to hear about how everyday New Yorkers experience the health system. Got a tip? Email [email protected].
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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