What the Data Show

This is one of three supporting documents connected to Vital City’s recommendations on serious mental illness and homelessness, “What To Do (and Not To Do) About People in Crisis on Streets and Subways.” Find "How the System Works (or Doesn't)" here and "Case Studies from Other Large Cities" here.

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New York City’s homelessness, mental illness and crime challenges cannot be understood — or solved — without reliable, integrated information. We compiled every publicly available dataset we could locate, from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s point-in-time counts and the New York City Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter censuses to NYPD arrest and complaint files. Instead of a coherent archive, we found a patchwork: Critical fields are redacted or never collected, time frames rarely align and comparable metrics live in agencies that seldom share records. When the City’s own practitioners must fly blind, it is no surprise that residents, advocates and policymakers struggle to agree on the scale or nature of the problem.

Fragmentation is most acute at the fault line between criminal justice agencies and the social service providers who manage shelters, street outreach and behavioral health care. Legal and technical barriers to data exchange — like federal health privacy law (HIPAA) worries, state confidentiality statutes, incompatible software and simple mistrust — meaning police, courts and jails see only the “public safety” slice of a person’s history, while clinicians and case managers remain unaware of justice involvement that shapes housing and treatment options. This siloed architecture contributes to the predictable “revolving door” — street to emergency room to shelter to precinct to jail to street — each stop adding trauma and cost without resolving the underlying need.

These structural blind spots make public accountability nearly impossible. Program outcomes cannot be tracked, duplication of effort goes unnoticed, and evidence-based budgeting becomes guesswork. The analysis that follows therefore serves a dual purpose: It distills what the existing numbers do reveal about the intersection of homelessness, mental illness and crime, and it maps the yawning gaps that must be closed if the City hopes to manage the problem rather than merely react to its most visible symptoms.

Although the data are fragmented, it still allows us to sketch a picture of this population.

New York City’s unsheltered population has grown over the past decade.

• January 2024's HOPE count, the annual tally of unsheltered homeless individuals, was 2.4% higher than 2023.
• The 2024 count is 7.3% above the 2020 prepandemic level.
• The count of unsheltered homeless individuals is up 23.3% since 2014.

The point-in-time counts likely only represent a fraction of the total population.

• Point-in-time counts provide only a one-night snapshot and miss the many people who cycle in and out of unsheltered homelessness over the year.
• Other U.S. cities find annual unique counts run two to four times higher than their point-in-time snapshots.
• In New York City, outreach data suggest that the number of people living in the subway system is at least three times the official point-in-time count. According to the Coalition for the Homeless, 9,231 individuals accepted transport to shelter between May 2020 and January 2022 — an average of roughly 5,300 people per year, several times the 2021 subway HOPE count of 1,280. The true figure is likely higher, since these outreach totals reflect only successful engagements at end-of-line stations.
• Applying conservative multipliers of 2 to 4 to the City's 2024 HOPE count (4,140) yields an annual range of roughly 8,000 to 16,000 unsheltered individuals over the course of a year, with a midpoint near 12,000.

New York City has a very low unsheltered population compared to other large U.S. cities.

• Even using these 8,000-16,000 estimates of the total, distinct annual unsheltered population, New York City's street homeless count as a percentage of population is low compared to many other cities.
• With 97% of New Yorkers experiencing homelessness indoors, only 3% remain on the street — by far the smallest unsheltered share of any large U.S. city. New York City's unsheltered PIT share hovered around 5% for most of the past decade, dipping below that mark just twice — first in 2019 and again in 2024.
• The 2024 record low stems not from fewer people outdoors but from a surge in shelter capacity for newly arrived asylum seekers, which swelled the overall census and drove the unsheltered percentage down.
• West Coast hubs such as San Jose (25%), Los Angeles (30%) and San Diego/San Francisco (42%) leave the majority of their unhoused residents outside.
• Midwestern and Sunbelt cities occupy the middle ground. Houston shelters 61%, Phoenix 57% and Dallas 71% — highlighting the wide national spread between New York City's right-to-shelter model and the West Coast's street-dominant reality.

• In other colder-weather peer cities, about 1 in 5 people experiencing homelessness live outside: Roughly 17.7% of Chicago's homeless population was unsheltered in January 2025 and 18.8% in Philadelphia in January 2024, according to official point-in-time counts from each city's homelessness agency.
• Only four large cities have 1.5% or more of their total population in homelessness: Seattle (2.2%), Denver (2.0%), Los Angeles (1.8%) and New York (1.7%). New York is the sole member of that group that keeps the vast majority of this population indoors.
• Los Angeles and New York City host a similar share of residents experiencing homelessness (about 1 in 55), but LA's street population count is 11 times larger (49,509 vs. 4,397) because 70% of its unhoused residents sleep outside, while New York City limits that figure to 3%.
• Because New York's right-to-shelter mandate keeps street homelessness near 3%, the remaining unsheltered population likely differs markedly from those in cities without such guarantees, a distinction that may complicate the easy adoption of some evidence-based interventions tested elsewhere.

311 homelessness complaints in New York have risen faster than the underlying growth in the homeless population, reflecting both increased public concern and evolving protocols.

• The number of 311 calls for homelessness-related issues tripled from 2019 to 2024.
• New York City government received more than 82,000 homelessness-related 311 calls in 2024.
• Several administrative changes — including enabling people to submit 311 complaints about subway-related issues, expanding which problems could be reported and adjusting how complaints were routed — contributed to the increase, complicating year-to-year comparisons.
• In 2024, DHS handled about two-thirds (67%) of these calls — typically those that did not involve perceived or potential danger — and the NYPD handled the remaining 33%.
• The two agencies moved at very different speeds: The median closure time was 45 minutes for NYPD versus 269 minutes for DHS.
• There were also variable outcomes depending on agency.
• NYPD reported that, in 58% of cases, they could not locate the person involved and referred the remaining 42% to DHS. Out of more than 30,000 cases, they documented resolving the underlying condition only about a dozen times.
• DHS similarly could not find the individual in 45% of its cases, reported refusals of assistance in 12%, referred 6% back to NYPD and closed 18% for technical or administrative reasons.

311 calls for homelessness are very concentrated in specific parts of the city.

• 50% of the 311 calls occur in 0.7% of the city's surface area as measured by census blocks.
• Twenty-three distinct census blocks ranked among the top 100 locations for calls in 2022, 2023 and 2024. All but one were in Manhattan, south of 57th Street; the exception was the block containing Moore Homestead Playground in Elmhurst, Queens.

The number and percentage of total arrests of street homelessness have been increasing over the past several years.

• Total arrests of unhoused individuals on the street — on any charges — climbed 17.3% in 2024, rising from 13,017 to 15,274, and now stand 38.4% above their 2022 level.
• Arrests of all other individuals increased 14.8% in 2024 and are 36.0% higher than in 2022.
• A striking share of people living on the street interact with law enforcement in a single year. Using the rough rule of thumb that the January point-in-time count may reflect only one-fourth to one-half of the true unsheltered population, the 15,274 arrests of street-homeless people recorded in 2024 would touch somewhere between 42% and 82% of the unsheltered population. For context, the NYPD arrested about 1.7% of all city residents, meaning unsheltered New Yorkers were booked at roughly 24 to 48 times the per capita rate of the general population. This doesn't necessarily mean that this population is committing crimes at a dramatically higher rate; it may mean that police enforcement tends to be more focused on these individuals, or both.

One-time arrests dominate, but a tiny core of street-homeless New Yorkers is booked again and again.

• Of the 6,942 unsheltered people arrested on any charge in 2024, 58.1% (4,033 people) were taken into custody just once.
• A significant 22.9% (1,587 people) of this population was arrested three or more times.
• A small number of people in this population are frequent offenders: 9.4% (653 people) logged five or more arrests, while 2.3% (157 people) hit double-digit arrests within a single year. Forty-three people, or just 0.6% of the street homeless population, were booked 16 or more times.

Most of the arrests among this population, as with the general population, are for property crimes.

• Analysis of the 2024 National Crime Information Center (NCIC) charge data for the 6,942 street-homeless arrestees reveal that larceny is the leading charge among street homeless individuals. More than a quarter of all unsheltered arrestees, 27.5% (1,907 people), were picked up for larceny at least once, generating 4,715 bookings, averaging 2.5 arrests per person.
• Low-level drug cases are the second most common charge. One-fifth of arrestees (1,400 people) were charged with drug-related offenses (usually simple drug possession), producing 1,752 arrests — about 1.3 arrests per person.
• Assault rounds out the top three, but at a much lower volume. Physical-force charges reached 18.5% of the cohort (1,285 people), responsible for 1,555 arrests (1.2 each). In 2024, New Yorkers overall had about 550 assault arrests per 100,000 people, while the unsheltered homeless population, roughly 12,000 people, had an estimated 13,000 per 100,000, about 20 to 25 times higher.

Low-level property and drug charges drive arrests of unsheltered New Yorkers

• Among unsheltered individuals arrested in 2024, petit larceny is by far the most common charge, accounting for 26% of cases — 3,940 arrests in total — which is more than three times the number for the next most common charge, simple drug possession, with 1,004 arrests.
• Theft of services makes up 3.2% of arrests among unsheltered individuals, totaling 486 cases, the majority of which involve farebeating — highlighting how fare enforcement often functions as a point of entry into the justice system for people without stable housing.
• Of the 1,200 assault arrests logged against street-homeless New Yorkers in 2024, 543 cases (45%) were misdemeanor assault in the third degree, 460 cases (38%) were felony assaults and 197 cases (16%) specifically involved assaults on police or peace officers (PL 120.08 or 120.05-3).
• Around 16% of arrests for minor administrative or code violations in 2024 fell on unhoused individuals, indicating that routine ordinance enforcement disproportionately affects people living on the streets. This was before a sharp escalation in low-level enforcement, as subway violation arrests surged to 823 in the first quarter of 2025 — up 331% from the same period in 2019 and 146% in that period in 2024.

Housing instability and serious mental illness are disproportionately common among New Yorkers cycling through Rikers Island.

• 26% of people in City jails are homeless or likely to be homeless when entering or leaving custody.
• 56% are enrolled in jail mental health services and 21% meet the definition of serious mental illness.
• These metrics demonstrate a strong overlap between homelessness, serious mental illness and jail admissions.

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