The known death toll resulting from the brutal cold snap that has gripped New York City in recent weeks increased on Tuesday, as city officials acknowledged that seven people had died of cold exposure while at private residences, in addition to the 18 people found outside.
It was not immediately clear whether any of the buildings in question had faulty heating systems. Many apartment buildings struggle to maintain a comfortable temperature during the winter, and the city received more complaints about heat and hot water in January than any month on record.
Nor was it immediately clear how the number of indoor deaths, which City Hall officials said had occurred since Jan. 19, when the round-the-clock “Code Blue” alert went into effect, compared with the toll of the last cold snap of similar duration, which began in 2017 and ended in 2018.
The news arrived as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s handling of the cold has come under intense scrutiny, with a City Council panel grilling members of his administration on Tuesday.
“Every person who freezes to death in the city is a reminder that systems that are designed to protect human life are failing the people who need them most,” said Julie Menin, the Council speaker, at the start of an oversight hearing on the recent deaths that stretched past four hours, but elicited little in the way of new information from the city officials who testified.
Two of those officials, Molly Wasow Park, the commissioner of the Department of Social Services, and Zach Iscol, the city’s emergency management commissioner, are serving their final days in the administration.
The fact that both officials, holdovers from former Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, would soon leave their posts elicited some irritation on Tuesday from council members eager to hear how the Mamdani administration would work to avoid such a high death toll moving forward.
Though temperatures began to rise slightly on Tuesday after weeks of bitter temperatures, the city is still grappling with the fallout from the weekslong cold snap, which has posed a particular danger to people who are homeless and sleeping outside.
This weekend, Mr. Mamdani said the city had made 1,400 placements to shelters or other indoor facilities, but his administration also acknowledged that some of those placements might be duplicates — with people arriving at a shelter, leaving and then returning on another day.
These were lives “cut short by conditions that should never be fatal in a city as resource rich as ours,” said Crystal Hudson, the councilwoman from Brooklyn who chairs the General Welfare Committee.
The indoor deaths are likely to raise additional questions about the maintenance of New York City’s housing stock. During his mayoral campaign, Mr. Mamdani focused intensely on the concerns of renters in privately owned buildings, while placing less emphasis on the plight of the New York City Housing Authority buildings that house some 400,000 people in often substandard conditions and that fall under the city’s control.
On Tuesday, Mr. Mamdani announced that the city would hold a series of public hearings for tenants to publicly lodge complaints about their homes.
During the City Council hearing, several members questioned whether the city was acting forcefully enough to remove people from the street, even under duress, when temperatures had fallen so low that they became lethal.
The Police Department testified it had made 52 so-called involuntary removals of people from city streets since Jan. 19, a practice that as a candidate, Mr. Mamdani regarded with skepticism. Separately, the Department of Social Services said it had made 33 involuntary removals, which Ms. Park described as “far more than we would normally do with a few-week period.”
“But is it humane to leave them outside?” Ms. Menin asked.
Ms. Park said medical workers made those decisions in the field, based on whether they perceived the person to be exhibiting signs of mental illness, and whether they posed a danger to themselves or others.
“These are adults with agency and civil rights,” Ms. Park said.
During his last full day as emergency management commissioner, Mr. Iscol warned that the changing climate meant that such weather emergencies would likely become more common.
“Winter weather is just one example of how extreme weather conditions in New York City can be extraordinarily dangerous across many contexts,” he said.
Mihir Zaveri covers housing in the New York City region for The Times.
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