As the temperature in New York City dropped toward the single digits and the death toll during the deep freeze rose to 14, Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced the opening of 50 new single-room shelter units for homeless people in Upper Manhattan.
The goal, Mr. Mamdani said in a news release on Saturday night, was to remove “barriers that keep too many New Yorkers out in the cold.”
In the past week, nearly a foot of snow has blanketed New York City, and a lingering bitter cold has left people living on the streets vulnerable. On Saturday, Mr. Mamdani announced that the death toll of people found outside had reached 14. In eight of these cases, preliminary findings indicated hypothermia played a role, the mayor said.
On Jan. 5, the administration told the Police Department that the Department of Homeless Services and the Sanitation Department would now take the lead in reaching out to homeless people on the streets, but it was unclear if that policy change might have played a role in the number of deaths. On Saturday, during an unrelated news conference, Mr. Mamdani mounted a full-throated defense of his team’s work during what is widely regarded as the first major test of his month-old mayoralty.
“We have been taking every possible measure to get New Yorkers inside,” he said. “This has been a full, all-hands-on-deck approach.”
He then detailed a litany of steps that city workers have taken to bring New Yorkers in from the cold. The administration has intensified the level of outreach to those living on the streets, and has moved more than 860 people into shelters and safe havens, which have more privacy and fewer restrictions. (It remains unclear how many of those were repeat placements, where a person left and then was brought back to a shelter.)
The city has opened warming shelters, relaxed intake rules at homeless shelters, deployed warming buses and sent out 17 on-call ambulettes to go directly to people in need. The city has also removed 16 New Yorkers from the streets against their will, an increase from the three people that Mr. Mamdani’s team announced last Monday.
The mayor, who has in the past expressed ambivalence about involuntary removals, described these as involving people “who were determined to be a danger to themselves or others.”
New York City experiences deaths tied to the cold every year. It remains unclear how this death toll compares to previous cold snaps, but the toll now equals the number of New Yorkers who died in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida in 2021.
A 2018 study whose lead writers worked at the city’s health department found that the city averaged 15 cold-related deaths a year. There were 29 cold-related deaths in 2023, according to the mayor’s office.
On Sunday morning, Dave Giffen, the executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said the mayor was making 50 rooms available for homeless single adults at an existing shelter for adult families in Upper Manhattan. The adult families — largely couples or parents with an adult child — were being moved to places elsewhere in the shelter system that had capacity.
A spokesman for the mayor confirmed that information and stressed that single rooms like these are more appealing to individuals who resist moving into traditional congregate shelters. He said the shelters will be open 24 hours a day.
Mr. Giffen said, “It’s a welcome move.”
“Look, I am happy to see that the city is trying to get creative and moving quickly to try to find more options for people who are out on the streets and exposed to the cold,” he said.
That the conditions remain dire was brought home on Saturday night. Christine Quinn who has spent the past decade running the city’s largest network of family shelters, called WIN, said her organization got a walk-in at an East New York, Brooklyn, shelter. The facility looks like an apartment building from the outside, and normally families are referred there through the social services system.
“It’s never happened before in my tenure,” said Ms. Quinn, who added that Mr. Mamdani’s decision to open a new shelter was the right decision. “We don’t house singles at that shelter.”
She said her staff called the city’s informational hotline, 311, which was “immediately responsive, really terrific,” and gave the woman a coat and food. They believed she had clearly been outside, “roaming.”
Dana Rubinstein covers New York City politics and government for The Times.
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