Nearly 195,000 people slept in DHS shelters in 2025, the most in system’s history Coalition urges Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul to expand CityFHEPS, replace expiring federal vouchers, and invest in deeply affordable housing Today, the Coalition for the Homeless released its annual State of the Homeless report, titled A Crisis Inherited, A Choice Ahead. The report examines how the policies of Mayor Eric Adams’ four-year administration shaped New York City’s housing and homelessness crisis, and what they mean for Mayor Zohran Mamdani as his administration confronts a system under enormous strain. The report finds that homelessness rose sharply over the past four years, that some of the recent gains in moving people out of shelters were built on temporary measures that are now disappearing, and that while the new administration has taken some encouraging early steps, it has also continued several of the prior administration’s most contested policies. “The lesson of the last four years could not be more clear: if the City continues to ignore the fundamental causes of mass homelessness, the number of people sleeping in shelters and on the streets will just keep going up. And no one in our city wants to see that happen” said Dave Giffen, Executive Director of the Coalition for the Homeless. “Mayor Mamdani won the election on a promise of affordability, and we share that goal. But the “affordability agenda” must include the nearly 100,000 people sleeping in shelters tonight, the thousands on the streets and in the subways, and the quarter-million more doubled up in someone else’s home. The mayor cannot reduce mass homelessness without targeting resources where they are most needed and building on the approaches proven to work.” Homelessness worsened over the four years of the Adams administration even as the number of asylum seekers and other new arrivals in shelters declined. In 2025, 194,531 unique individuals used the NYC Department of Homeless Services shelter system over the course of the year – the most in the history of the system. The number of longer-term New Yorkers sleeping in DHS shelters each night grew by 27 percent, or 12,442 people, over the four years of the Adams administration. The number of NYC schoolchildren living doubled-up increased by 29 percent from 2022 through 2025, underscoring the broader scale of hidden homelessness beyond the shelter system. As more New Yorkers faced eviction, the City’s homelessness prevention tools failed to keep pace. Eviction filings surged from a pandemic low of 42,110 in 2021 to 114,832 in 2025, producing 17,821 marshal-executed evictions last year alone – more than in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. Applications for One-Shot Deals to cover rent arrears increased by 85 percent over the four years of the Adams administration, but the acceptance rate for those applications dropped from 35 percent in 2022 to 26 percent in 2025. The share of tenants with full legal representation in Housing Court fell from a high of 65.8 percent in early 2022 to just 27.8 percent by December 2025. Recent progress moving people out of shelter is at risk. The number of subsidized exits from shelters into permanent housing rose 82 percent, from 9,804 in 2022 to 17,870 in 2025 – but much of that progress relied on temporary federal Emergency Housing Vouchers and voluntary homeless preference units funded with augmented CityFHEPS vouchers that are now being reduced or discontinued. The four years of the Adams administration saw 33,550 shelter exits using CityFHEPS, even though the administration refused to implement the City Council’s expansion of the program. Even as the number of extremely low-income households grew by more than 91,000, the City financed only about 10,000 units of housing affordable to them. Punitive responses to unsheltered homelessness did not connect people to housing. Over an 18-month span, the City conducted 4,142 encampment sweeps affecting 6,062 people – only 263 of whom entered shelter on the day they were removed. During the same period, there were 46,113 NYPD-aided removals of homeless individuals. While 1,103 safe haven and stabilization beds were added over the four years of the Adams administration, about half had already been put in the pipeline by the prior administration, and only one new bed was added in Adams’ final year. The report makes clear that the crisis is, at its root, an affordable housing crisis. More than half of New York City residents are rent-burdened, and well over half a million households are both extremely low-income and paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent – an enormous reservoir of impending homelessness that looming federal cuts to SNAP, Medicaid, and housing programs threaten to push into shelters. At the same time, the Coalition notes early positive efforts by the Mamdani administration, including the SPEED initiative to cut administrative delays in housing placements. The report urges Mayor Mamdani and Governor Hochul to move away from crisis management and toward a housing-first strategy that prevents homelessness, accelerates shelter exits, and connects unsheltered New Yorkers to permanent housing. Key recommendations include: Build and fund at least 12,000 new units of deeply subsidized affordable housing for homeless and extremely low-income households every year for the next five years. Drop the City’s litigation against the CityFHEPS expansion laws, implement the City Council’s reforms, and expand access to CityFHEPS for households sheltered across all systems. Create a comprehensive plan to ensure that the approximately 5,500 households with NYCHA-administered Emergency Housing Vouchers do not lose their homes or return to shelter when federal funding runs out. Fill vacant NYCHA units with households in shelter and people at risk of losing federal housing vouchers, while reducing long turnaround times for vacant apartments. Increase funding for Right to Counsel so all eligible low-income tenants have lawyers in Housing Court. Implement a true Housing First approach for unsheltered New Yorkers with serious mental illness, including using vacant supportive housing units to quickly connect 2,000 people from the transit system and other public spaces to permanent supportive housing. Add 2,000 new single-occupancy safe haven beds, invest in additional Intensive Mobile Treatment teams, remove NYPD and Sanitation from homeless outreach, and end quality-of-life enforcement against homeless individuals. Increase funding for the Housing Access Voucher Program at the state level, make the program permanent, expand State FHEPS as an entitlement, and accelerate production of supportive The full report can be read here.
