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NYC spending on homelessness has soared. So has the number of people on the street.
By
Karen Yi
Published Oct 15, 2026
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Karen Yi / Gothamist
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Karen Yi
Published Oct 15, 2026
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New York City is spending millions on services for homeless people living on the street. But more New Yorkers are sleeping outside than ever before.
Calls to 311 related to homelessness tripled between 2019 and 2024 and spending for street homelessness tripled in roughly the same time period, the state comptroller found. Nearly 5,000 people slept on the streets or subways this year.
Homeless advocates, business groups and elected leaders say the problem is that the Mamdani administration needs to streamline what’s become an inefficient and largely uncoordinated street outreach system — and one that lacks clear accountability.
“What is happening right now is cruel and ineffective. It wastes money and doesn't fix the problem,” said Jeremy Saunders, co-executive director of VOCAL-NY, a grassroots organization advocating for low-income communities.
“We need a City Hall approach where we say, ‘This is a priority. There's political will to address it. We are going to improve the systems we have,’” Saunders said.
Many administrations have tried to tackle homelessness with varying degrees of success. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio effectively ended chronic homelessness for veterans. Homeless advocates hope the Mamdani administration can do the same for other New Yorkers.
Gothamist spoke to more than a dozen stakeholders who said the city’s outreach approach to street homelessness isn’t working and leaves too many New Yorkers living outside in harsh and dangerous conditions. They said that’s happening for various reasons: The dozens of outreach groups hired by various agencies and organizations often overlap and can overwhelm the very people they’re trying to help, there’s no one person in charge across city and state agencies, and a lack of enough housing or temporary beds that people want to accept.
“The people who do this work are doing God's work, but they're operating in an ineffective, inefficient system,” said Tom Harris, president of the Times Square Alliance, a business improvement district. He said at least nine different groups provide outreach in Midtown alone.
The Department of Homeless Services, which oversees a bulk of the outreach work, said it was strengthening its approach, better using data and updating policies to better help the nearly 5,000 New Yorkers sleeping outdoors. Unlike in other major cities, most homeless people in New York City are housed and less than 5% reside on the street.
The Mamdani administration put DHS, instead of NYPD, in charge of deciding which homeless encampments are cleared and are supposed to conduct outreach to individuals living in the encampments for seven days before a sweep. Last month, the city also began rerouting 311 calls related to homelessness to DHS, rather than the police.
“We are committed to helping every New Yorker living on the street come inside and find a path to stability,” DHS spokesperson Nicholas Jacobelli said in a statement.
The mayor’s office didn’t return requests for comment.
Too many teams
Dozens of outreach groups fan out across the city daily, with the goal of getting to know New Yorkers sleeping on the street and following them through until they find housing.
The city’s Department of Homeless Services contracts four providers across the five boroughs and one for the subway system. The mayor’s office of community mental health and the public hospital system deploy their own teams. So do local business improvement districts, nonprofits and even the Manhattan district attorney’s office. Other outreach workers are contracted by the state.
But with so many groups doing outreach, some have no way of knowing if another group already came by hours earlier and could repeat the same work. Experts say if there were better coordination, outreach workers could devote far more attention and do better at following through with a smaller group of people.
DHS-contracted providers can access centralized software to log interactions, but others can’t, creating silos across organizations who may be trying to help the same person.
“We don't need to change how we talk to a person on the street,” said Erica Strang, director of the Manhattan Outreach Consortium at the Center for Urban Community Services, which is contracted by the city to do outreach in Manhattan.
“Let's think better about the triage and who is the group that is saying, ‘This is our guy, and we're going to follow him through this whole thing?'”
Strang said there was a similar lack of organization in the early 2000s. To fix it, the Bloomberg administration decided to hire one provider to do outreach for each borough. That led to a 40% decline in street homelessness. But since then, the system has swung back in the other direction with more programs and groups hitting the streets — and not all able to talk to each other.
Andrew Chappotin, 41, spent more than three years sleeping on the streets in Midtown. By his count, five or six different outreach groups tried to help him. All told, he estimates he spoke to 30-40 different workers on the street and subways, repeating much the same information about his background to each new person.
“ You become numb,” said Chappotin, a member of the Safety Net Activists, a group of New Yorkers who are formerly homeless or experience poverty advocating for policy changes. He’s now in a Safe Haven site that has more flexible rules and privacy than traditional shelters.
He said the few times he accepted a shelter bed came after an outreach worker tried to get to know him — something that could happen more often if there were better coordination between workers.
”They might have gotten me a cup of coffee, sat down, had a conversation, introduced themselves, reminded me what their name was three or four times and actually seemed genuine,” he said. “Not seeming like they're in a rush.”
Strang said outreach workers have two jobs: getting to know people on the street and case management. But said outreach workers are saddled with growing case loads which can make it harder to do the work.
“ You can't have all these different entities doing the same thing and not moving forward in any way,” said Barbara Blair, president of the Garment District Alliance, a business improvement district that contracts its own outreach workers.
“You should be building on the work of each other, the successes of each other, the setbacks that you may have had, so that it's like a team approach to a person.”
No one in charge
Advocates and business leaders agreed there needs to be one person in charge who can bring in all the disparate groups to row in the same direction.
With outreach teams and programs stretched across various state and city agencies, it’s difficult to track which approach is more effective, they said.
“There's no quarterback,” said Brian Stettin, who advised the Adams administration on severe mental illness. He said it’s not that there are too many teams but someone should be calling the shots on what groups should take responsibility for a particular person and where others could step back.
Saunders, from VOCAL-NY, said every administration likes to launch a new program even as existing ones continue their work. That can confuse the map of services and ultimately dilute accountability.
“ Politicians like to send out press statements about the big thing they're doing. They don't see it as beneficial to saying, ‘You know what? I'm gonna look inward at the systems we have, and I'm going to make them work,’” Saunders said.
He said the city focuses too much on tracking interactions between outreach workers and homeless people rather than more durable results, such as how many people are staying in housing or in shelter.
DHS said they do have performance measures for their contracted providers that include housing placements and engagement numbers, but failing to meet those goals doesn’t impact their funding.
The agency plans to spend nearly $450 million on outreach and related services this year, budget numbers show, but those numbers don’t include how much other programs at other agencies cost or how much other organizations are paying for outreach.
Stettin said the Adams administration tried to build more coordination by creating geographical hubs where all the groups, police, and the city gathered monthly to talk about individual clients. But getting them all to sign agreements to voluntarily fall under the direction of DHS never worked.
“ You're asking them to give up some of their autonomy,” he said. “Because it would be best for the people on the street.”
Nowhere to go
The other problem is that there aren’t enough beds that homeless people want to accept because they don’t feel safe.
”The one thing that every street homeless New Yorker has in common is that they've been through the shelter system and chosen to stay out on the street,” said Councilmember Lincoln Restler of Brooklyn.
The city has about 4,400 Safe Haven beds with more flexible rules and privacy than traditional shelters, but finding an available space can be difficult. That means outreach teams don’t always have the tools they need to be successful.
“It's so important to be able to deliver on something tangible for clients as soon as they tell you that they're ready. Otherwise, we risk losing them,” said Alexandra Francis, executive vice president of case management at BronxWorks, an outreach provider contracted by the city and the state.
She said the caseload among outreach workers has grown 57% in the last five years.
DHS said the Mamdani administration opened more than 500 beds this year and another 120 would open by December.
Miguel Sanchez usually settles on a quiet block in Gowanus at night to sleep. He said outreach workers have tried to help, referring him to four different shelter beds. But those stays all ended early, often due to an aggressive roommate or a missed curfew, he said.
“I’ve been there, done that,” said Sanchez, who has been homeless for five years. He said he wants a private room, one where he’s not scared to sleep next to other men, and where he can keep his belongings — like things from his kids — without them getting stolen.
“ There's then this cliff of what happens after the outreach, that is also sort of a big snarl and how you go from outreach to what the ultimate goal should be, which is some kind of stable housing, is not a straight line at all,” said Elizabeth Glazer, founder of Vital City, a nonprofit think tank that issued a report about street homelessness last year.
Outreach workers said the city used to set aside Safe Haven beds for people who were chronically homeless and harder to place. But those rules changed and now anyone known to a street outreach worker can get a bed — and increasingly more groups can refer people to beds.
But advocates said more are needed and ultimately, more permanent places for New Yorkers to live.
“ We wouldn't have to build a new shelter or have a shelter with so many people if there were more options to get folks out,” said Strang, the outreach worker.
“The experience of being in a shelter would probably feel a lot better if there was more movement happening. … It's not just about getting you inside and bye-bye.”
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the number of Safe Haven beds in the city, which offer more flexible rules and greater privacy than traditional shelters. There are 4,400.
Tagged
homelessness
housing
new york city
Karen Yi
Karen Yi covers homelessness and poverty. She joined the WNYC and Gothamist newsroom in 2020. Before that, Karen covered Newark for the Star-Ledger and spent almost a decade working for newspapers in New Jersey and Florida. She grew up in Miami and has a dog named Cashew. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or Signal 917-589-1460.
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Gothamist is funded by sponsors and member donations
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