What blaring headlines about excessive spending reveal — and what they miss
I first learned how to do outreach to homeless individuals on the streets of the Bronx in 2005, where, at BronxWorks, I was part of a shift in how such work is done — from passively handing out sandwiches to people who were willing to engage, to actively seeking out those who were not.
We climbed under fences, ventured deep into remote areas of parks and public spaces, and resolved long-standing encampments through a strong, coordinated response across city agencies. By some measures, this approach reduced street homelessness citywide by nearly 40% between 2005 and 2009.
Since then, we’ve forgotten some of what drove that success. As the homelessness problem grew — from about 37,000 people in shelter each night in 2009 to over 85,000 today — so did emergency spending and response. In the process, we lost the intensity of focus and leadership that encampment resolutions require.
Outreach is among the most challenging roles in homeless services. Anyone who takes it on quickly learns that success is measured not in any single interaction, but in what comes before and after: the months of trust-building, the institutional readiness to receive someone when they finally say yes and the careful coordination of care to ensure that same individual does not land right back on the street after a housing placement. Unsheltered homeless individuals do not land on the street overnight; they have usually been failed by multiple social safety nets, and they are choosing personal autonomy in ways that may seem strange — even frustrating — to those of us who have stable housing situations. And yes, a portion of this population may be unable to make rational decisions concerning their own well-being due to substance use or serious mental illness.
Two recent flashpoints have renewed conversations over how to approach this problem effectively and efficiently: a New York Times piece on the intractability of shelter avoidance, and viral reports in the press and on social media, which reference a New York State Comptroller’s report concluding that New York City allegedly spent $81,000 per street homeless person last year. Both deserve a careful and considered response.
No easy answers
When people talk about encampments, they are most often referring to one or more individuals who have established improvised structures (using tents, tarps or other materials) as a temporary shelter in a public space or vacant private property. And let’s be clear: Homeless encampments are dangerous for everyone in them. As a form of shelter, they are inadequate and unsanitary. They also compound the kinds of trauma — including past experiences with violence — that often drives people to the street in the first place. Encampments can also impede foot traffic, disrupting surrounding neighborhoods and the New Yorkers who share those public spaces.
A persistent encampment sends a signal — to the people living in it and to the surrounding community — that this is an acceptable outcome. It isn’t. But it’s equally true that if you rush to dismantle encampments without a strategic, coordinated plan, you won’t solve the problem. You will just move it around.
A New York City Comptroller’s audit found that a paltry 5% of people accepted temporary shelter from encampments cleared between March 1, 2022 and November 30, 2022. Of the 2,036 people in those encampments, only 119 accepted shelter. Sixty-six of those remained in shelter for more than 50 days and only three made it into permanent housing. That is an enormous expenditure of resources by police, sanitation and nonprofits whose job it is to help unhoused individuals find shelter for an outcome that amounts to rearranging where people sleep on the streets.
Few would disagree that the goal should be connecting people in need to appropriate settings and ensuring that the encampment does not return once it’s addressed. The question is how to get there.
When Breaking Ground, the nonprofit where I serve as chief operating officer, began its outreach work over two decades ago, the approach to encampments was genuinely collaborative. Today, Breaking Ground, under contract with the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), is responsible for the bulk of outreach to street homeless individuals for the entire boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, along with a swath of Midtown Manhattan from 23rd to 59th Street, river-to-river.
At the outset, we and our peer outreach providers — the people with daily, face-to-face relationships with individuals living outside — fed information to DHS to help shape decisions about when and how to approach a cleanup. That intelligence was the difference between knowing that a particular encampment includes three people who were days away from agreeing to come inside and treating it as an obstacle to be cleared on a schedule set by a 311 complaint.
The advent of HOME-STAT in 2016, through which the de Blasio administration sought to replicate the success of the Police Department’s data-driven COMPStat, brought innovation and additional resources to street outreach. But it also introduced layers of bureaucracy that, in some key ways, have thwarted creativity. Over the past decade, the City’s encampment strategy transformed into a sterile set of protocols, with nonprofit outreach providers — who, thanks to contracts with the City, provide the bulk of outreach efforts to homeless individuals — cut completely out of the picture.
If the sole goal was to close out 311 complaints in a timely manner, that approach could claim a certain kind of success. If the goal was getting people to enter shelter willingly and begin the process of stabilization, it was a failure as documented by the City’s own data.
Effective encampment response requires cutting through the fragmentation of various City departments with two things: urgency and accountability. Nonprofit outreach providers should be back at the table as genuine strategic partners with DHS, not just implementers of decisions made above them. Everyone involved — DHS, the Police Department, Department of Sanitation, Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Department of Parks & Recreation, nonprofit providers — must agree on a timeline for resolution and operate under clear, shared rules, such as those outlined in this special Vital City report. We must also build in aftercare through sustained follow-up to ensure that people placed from an encampment remain housed, and that new encampments do not reemerge in the same spaces. The goal should not be simply to clean the area, but to house the people.
Finally, one of the most promising areas for innovation is accelerating placements to permanent housing. Every month that a street homeless individual is not cycling through various systems — emergency rooms and hospitalization, shelters, safe havens, drop-in centers, jail — can lead to better health outcomes and save thousands of public dollars.
The spending argument gets it wrong
The recent viral claim that New York City spends over $81,000 per unsheltered homeless person demands scrutiny not because the spending figures are incorrect, but the denominator is wrong.
The $81,000 figure, which understandably causes jaws to drop, is derived by dividing total city spending on unsheltered homelessness by the number of unsheltered people counted in the annual HOPE survey, a point-in-time count conducted on a single night each year that is specifically designed as a benchmarking tool, not a census.
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. Outreach data suggest the true annual figure is much higher than the official count. The Comptroller’s report, for instance, also noted that the City made 10,841 placements from an unsheltered location to “stable settings” in fiscal year 2025 — 400% more than in 2017. That suggests the number of people experiencing street homelessness was likely more than triple the HOPE count measure. (Breaking Ground’s outreach teams alone engaged with over 5,300 unique individuals in 2025.) Dividing real spending by an artificially small number produces an artificially large per-person cost.
The spending critique also misses something entirely. Safe haven beds — specialized transitional units designed for short-term use by chronically homeless individuals who have consistently refused traditional shelter due to restrictive rules or safety fears — numbered approximately 1,100 in April of 2020. Today, the City has expanded this resource to more than 2,100 beds at a cost of nearly $120 million, absorbing more than 1,000 additional people into these more intensive, humane settings while safe haven staff and outreach teams continue to work with each individual to find permanent housing.
Safe havens offer more privacy than traditional shelter and do not require the homeless individual to go to a central intake center — outreach teams transport the individual directly to their placement and accompany them through intake. In addition, by offering clinical support, no curfews and the kind of structured environment where someone who has spent years on the street can begin to stabilize, safe havens are a meaningful alternative to shelter for those who have been unsheltered for long periods of time. This is hardly evidence of waste. To the contrary, it is a deliberate, and appropriate, upgrade in the quality of care over these five years.
During that same period, the HOPE count rose from 3,857 to 4,305. So is that evidence that despite the money we’re “throwing at” homelessness, the problem is growing? No. When the number of people on the street grows, it’s not a direct function of outreach’s effectiveness or lack thereof; it’s the result of an unsheltered homeless population that is likely growing faster than even the tools we use to measure and address it can capture.
The real villain in the spending data is not homeless service providers, it is the housing market. According to the most recent data, the vacancy rate for units that rent for under $1,100 per month is just 0.39%. That is most certainly a crisis for people in the lowest quintile of income. And a statistical analysis by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that a $100 increase in median rent is associated with a 9% increase in homelessness. Is it any wonder that homelessness is growing?
Additionally, more than 77% of unsheltered New Yorkers surveyed by the Coalition for the Homeless in 2018 had already tried the shelter system. Meanwhile, the number of single adults in shelters has climbed from roughly 14,000 in 2016 to over 25,000 today.
Street homelessness is not, primarily, a story of people refusing help. It is largely a story of people who tried the system, had a negative experience and ended up outside. The city’s shelter system is the main feeder for street homelessness, and the housing market is the exit ramp that unhoused individuals can never quite reach.
The City and State are spending heavily on crisis response because they have not invested adequately in prevention. More safe havens are needed, yes — and more permanent supportive housing, and more deeply affordable units, and faster pathways out of shelter and off the streets. The question should not be whether $81,000 per person is too much, but whether we’re spending it in the right places, and whether we’re building enough housing so that the next person who arrives at central intake doesn’t eventually end up on the street.
Those of us who do this work every day already know the answer. We’re ready to help the City find it.
