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Alliance Alert: While it is encouraging to see ���������� City and State continue to provide more investments aimed at reducing homelessness, with a particular focus on people who are utilizing the subway system for shelter, the programs and policies they are using to do so much be scrutinized for their effectiveness and whether they are causing more harm.

Both the Mayor and Governor have funded an array of outreach programs for people dealing with homelessness in the subway, but these programs differ greatly in approach and may stand to contradict each other. Programs like the Safe Option Supports (SOS) teams are more focused on building trust with individuals and addressing their immediate needs, with the goal of facilitating their move into permanent housing. Other programs, including the Mayor’s 2022 involuntary removal initiative and law enforcement led outreach programs, focus more on removing individuals from the subways to evaluated for involuntary hospitalization or sent to a shelter.

Advocates in the state, including the Alliance, continue to be concerned with the programs and policies focused on removal because they criminalize homelessness and mental health challenges. People should not be forced to interact with law enforcement, involuntarily hospitalized, or further traumatized just because they seem to need support. Importantly, these removal policies do not ensure people receive that needed support after removal. While the City touts that an average of 137 people are involuntarily sent to the hospital per week, they have failed to provide information on the supports those individuals actually received, including whether they entered stable housing.

Simply removing people from public spaces is not a humane nor effective way to reduce homelessness and support people with major needs. We must instead focus on what will truly help people, more low barrier housing with supports like true Housing First provides. Pushing for removals does nothing to support people and could in fact make it harder to connect with other folks in need because it causes fears of being jailed or hospitalized against one’s will or makes it harder for outreach teams to find folks they have been working to connect with.

���������� City and state must focus on increasing the availability of affordable housing, continue funding the effective and humane outreach programs, and stop criminalizing mental health challenges and homelessness. The Alliance will continue to push for funding and policies which do this, and fight against those that look to scapegoat our community as perpetrators of violence who need to be removed from the public. You can join our efforts by signing up for our upcoming legislative day and staying connected to learn about other opportunities for advocacy throughout the year. and read below for more information on the City and State’s current response to the growing homelessness and mental health crisis.

Homelessness, Mental Health and Subway Safety: How Hochul and Adams Faced the Trifecta in NY
������ | Gothamist | October 15, 2024

Daniel Penny is  this month on charges of manslaughter and criminally negligent homicide, nearly a year-and-a-half after the former Marine put fellow passenger Jordan Neely — who struggled with mental health issues and homelessness for much of his life — in a fatal chokehold on a crowded F train. Penny has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

The incident surfaced a deep divide in how ����������ers view the city’s approach to homelessness, mental health and public safety — a trifecta that Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul frequently invoked and pledged to address even before the fatal encounter on May 1, 2023. Their approach has combined increased outreach to homeless people with more policing and involuntary interventions.

Adams and Hochul have largely followed through on the plans they began to set in motion ahead of Neely’s death. They’ve flooded the subway with more than 2,000 more police officers per day, made it easier to involuntarily transport people to the hospital for mental health evaluations, and added to the constellation of outreach workers who seek to engage homeless ����������ers living outside the city’s shelters.

Adams says the city is also still plugging away at his  sleeping in the subway to go above ground. But the overall impact of the moves remains unclear, with some advocates calling for more data on long-term outcomes for those whom the city seeks to help.

Spokespeople for both Adams and Hochul say that their outreach teams are making progress in connecting people in the subway to permanent housing, though homeless service providers say reaching that goal can be challenging because of the limited housing supply and the issues their clients face.

But subway outreach workers say the vast police presence in the subway sometimes makes connecting with the people they’re trying to serve more difficult, and are divided on whether police involvement helps or hurts. Meanwhile, City Hall has declined to provide an update on involuntary hospital transports, and existing data from the city and state has failed to capture what happens after someone is taken to the hospital.

The city doesn’t appear to be making significant progress in reducing unsheltered street and subway homelessness overall, although some advocates say it can be hard to get an accurate estimate. The city’s  of ����������ers living on the streets and in the subway, conducted in January, estimated there were more than 4,000 unsheltered individuals across the city, about a 2% increase from the previous year. About half resided in the subway, a 4% decrease from 2023. Since then, the Adams administration has implemented policies limiting the amount of time migrants can spend in city shelters, potentially contributing to more unsheltered homelessness.

But as far as subway safety, Adams insists, “We are on the right track.” He has recently touted figures showing that subway crime is on the decline overall, with a 5.1% drop this year to date.

It’s unclear how much of the crime in the subway is committed by people who are homeless or dealing with mental health issues, and advocates say these vulnerable ����������ers are themselves put at risk when officials link their presence too closely with subway safety. But many subway riders are still on edge. In an  conducted earlier this year, 44% of respondents said people acting erratically on the train affected their satisfaction with the transit system, making it the top concern ahead of “quality of life” issues, and the desire for more reliable service.

Finding people permanent housing
Since taking office in 2022, Adams has doubled the number of city-funded workers doing homeless outreach on the streets and in the subways and connected more than 2,000 people to permanent housing, according to City Hall spokesperson William Fowler. That’s about the same number of housing placements the city made for homeless ����������ers through outreach teams under former Mayor Bill de Blasio during his second term in office, according to  on his administration’s street outreach efforts.

Meanwhile, Hochul’s Office of Mental Health has launched its own outreach program in partnership with the MTA, which primarily targets the subway. The program, known as SOS, landed an additional 577 people in their own apartments between its launch in April 2022 and the end of September, according to state data.

A key component of the SOS program is that caseworkers stick with their clients for up to a year after they are placed in an apartment to ensure they are settled and connected to services in the community, to try to ensure they don’t end up back on the street, said Tracy Wilson, the director of the Homeless Support Unit at the Office of Mental Health.

“It’s very challenging, especially early on,” Wilson said. “They really do need a high level of support to make sure that they’re able to be successful in that new setting.”

Typically, both city and state outreach programs offer people a range of services to try to meet their immediate needs. Workers then seek to get people to agree to move from the subway or street into transitional housing such as safe havens — shelters with fewer rules and lower barriers to entry — before helping them find a permanent place to stay. The goal is often to get them into a supportive housing program that offers subsidized rent and social services.

But Wilson said SOS is also building up a supply of 300 apartments in the city that are exclusively for members of the program, where clients are able to move in on the spot without stopping in a shelter or other transitional housing first. This model is known as “housing first,” and many social services providers tout it as the ideal way to help people become more stable, but it is otherwise practically nonexistent in ���������� City.

“I’ve been doing this job for more than 35 years and I’ve never met somebody who would turn down an offer of an actual apartment,” said David Giffen, executive director of Coalition for the Homeless, who lamented that there is not a greater focus on “housing first.”

Even with some on-demand apartments, street and subway outreach can be a slow process. SOS workers often spend months building a rapport with clients and establishing trust, Wilson said. “We really try to encourage the teams to figure out what people’s dreams and aspirations are and then try to find a way to connect housing and services to achieving that dream,” she said.

When asked whether the presence of police in the subway ever creates tension with clients, Wilson said, “It does make it challenging at times, I can’t lie.”

She said some officers “really understand” the work and help SOS teams identify people who need help. But she added that the city’s policy of trying to remove people from the subways can also make outreach work harder. “It’s just tricky trying to find people if they’re being told that they need to be off the premises.”

When the mayor was asked about that issue at a press conference announcing a new subway outreach team last week, he dismissed the concern. “The subway is not a place to house ����������ers,” Adams said. “Previous administrations may have just ignored it. But we made it clear. People cannot have a dignified place to live in the subway system.”

Providing services — whether people like it or not
In the aftermath of Neely’s death, some ����������ers  not just Neely’s killing, but also Adams’ hesitation to condemn Penny’s actions and the persistence with which Adams and Hochul had linked ����������ers’ safety in the subway with homelessness and mental illness. Some advocates say the policies and rhetoric the pair have embraced since then continue to do a disservice to people who are homeless or dealing with mental health issues.

“To automatically make the assumption that somebody who committed a crime in the subway system or on the street has a mental health issue is criminalizing mental illness,” said Jonathan Chung, director of public policy and advocacy at the ���������� City chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But Hochul and Adams have since stood behind their mix of policing and outreach, and have both launched their own outreach teams that have embedded law enforcement officers.

Adams’ latest outreach model, , features teams of four police officers, a nurse and two service coordinators. One PATH outreach worker, Shawn Tish, said police presence can put off some potential clients but added that officers typically only intervene if someone tries to attack him or one of his colleagues.

Since the PATH program launched in late August, however, the officers on the teams have also issued 18 summonses and removed 190 people from the subways, according to city data. The teams have connected more than 500 ����������ers to some type of services, such as temporary housing or medical care.

Some advocates lament that the city and state are both still committed to policies and programs that involve police or involuntary interventions, including taking people to the hospital without their consent.

“It traumatizes those individuals who are involuntarily transported,” said Giffen of Coalition for the Homeless.

But involuntary transports happened before Adams or Hochul took office — and it’s still unclear how much they’ve increased in recent years or what the effect of the new policy has been.

��dz���ܱ�’s&�Բ�����;, which include police and clinicians, specifically seek to identify people in the subway who might need to be hospitalized. Since launching in March, they have transported about 70 people to the hospital involuntarily, in addition to 32 who agreed to go of their own will, and 126 who accepted transportation to a shelter or safe haven.

City officials shared last November that an average of 137 ����������ers were being taken to the hospital involuntarily each week overall, but said at the time that there was not enough data to compare that figure to involuntary transports before the new policy took effect. The city also did not provide any information at the time on how many people who were taken to the hospital involuntarily were actually admitted, or what kind of services they received afterward.

When asked for the latest data on involuntary transports last week, Fowler said the city is holding off on providing those figures until its annual update next month. He also declined to provide an immediate update on efforts to meet the needs of those on the city’s Top 50 list of the “hardest to reach” ����������ers — which once included Neely.