New York City is enduring a brutal winter that has claimed at least 20 lives. Soon Mayor Zohran Mamdani will have to choose — between simply managing the homelessness crisis, and actually working to solve it.
Since 1981, New York City has had a “right to shelter” policy, which requires its government to provide a bed to anyone in need. This has become a hulking barrier to reform, creating a wildly expensive system that prioritizes emergency beds over permanent housing. Mr. Mamdani is well positioned to change course. His top lawyer, Steven Banks, helped create the right to shelter mandate and has the credibility to turn it into something new: a right to housing.
The right to shelter was born of moral urgency in the 1980s. With thousands of New Yorkers sleeping on the streets, it was the most humane and effective remedy. But I’ve seen its limits. In the early 1990s, I joined social workers reaching out to people in the squalor of the Amtrak tunnels under Riverside Park. Later, I responded to complaints from shelter residents and rode with teams coaxing people out of remote encampments.
The refrain was the same from most of the people I encountered: The shelters are impersonal and dangerous; there are too many rules; they are poorly staffed; the services don’t meet their needs. And most important, once you enter, there is nowhere to go.
Meanwhile, in City Hall, I watched the right to shelter policy give rise to an increasingly desperate search for shelter beds. Commissioners passed down stories of City Hall administrators being threatened with contempt when they failed to find beds; four officials were ordered to spend a night in a shelter’s intake center as punishment. (That order was overturned on appeal.) Desperate measures followed: Mayor Michael Bloomberg opened a family shelter in a repurposed Bronx jail, and even considered putting homeless New Yorkers on cruise ships. The Department of Homeless Services created a unit to broker deals with property owners so that supply stayed well ahead of demand.
Yet the shelter population kept swelling. When the migrant crisis hit in 2023, the number of people in shelters ballooned to more than 125,000. The Department of Homeless Services budget is now nearly $4 billion, which is about what the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development plans to spend for its largest program addressing homelessness across the United States. Scandals and a nearly $1 billion hotel-industry deal have only turbocharged claims that the system has become a shelter‑industrial complex.
We can do better than offering people sleeping on the street the nominal right to a shelter bed they routinely refuse. Our aim should be to make homes the default, not shelters.
Supportive permanent housing with on-site services — and without preconditions like sobriety — reliably stabilizes people with complex needs. Finland, Japan and the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs have already proven that when you build enough of these homes, chronic homelessness can fall to almost zero. New York City pioneered the supportive housing model in the 1980s and has built more than 32,000 units. But only about one in six applicants gets placed, because demand dwarfs supply.
For people who don’t require supportive housing, the city can help them pay their rent. Existing rental assistance programs are the city’s most effective tool for closing the affordability gap that drives housing instability.
Yet unlike funding for shelter spots, these housing investments are constrained by discretionary budget limits, producing a persistent mismatch: The city guarantees money for temporary shelter, but it restricts investment into the permanent housing that would allow people to leave shelters or bypass them altogether.
Producing enough housing could pay for itself. Decades of research show that providing easy-to-access, permanent supportive housing helps end chronic homelessness and slashes costs by reducing jail time, emergency room visits, ambulance runs and shelter use. New York could further cut its costs by adopting a predictive prevention approach like the one used in Los Angeles, in which people with the highest risk of living on the streets are identified and given targeted housing assistance and services. If emergency shelter serves only those with no viable alternative, hundreds of millions now spent on shelter beds could be redirected toward permanent, cost-effective housing.
With a right to affordable housing, rather than a right to shelter, we could restore shelters to their original purpose: a temporary refuge for people with nowhere else to go. That is not a retreat from compassion; it is an expansion of it. The most humane policy prevents homelessness before it starts.
There is precedent for significantly changing our approach. In 1993, New York State decided to reinvest the savings from closing psychiatric hospitals into community based‑services under the Community Mental Health Reinvestment Act. That shift required political will and negotiation. Though they were long-delayed and incomplete, those investments helped to create new systems of care. A more proactive and comprehensive effort today could redirect a significant portion of the shelter budget into permanent housing, prevention and rental assistance.
Mayor Mamdani has signaled an eagerness to open government to broader participation — his Office of Mass Engagement, which incorporates public feedback into city policy, is a start. He could take that mandate one step further, convening a public, transparent process that includes nonprofits, service providers, City Council members, housing developers and people who have experienced homelessness in discussions of how to solve these problems. Ask hard questions: Who should be prioritized for shelter? What alternatives will be guaranteed? How will the city expand rental assistance and supportive housing? How will we ensure vacant units are filled and bureaucratic barriers are removed?
There will be disagreements and fears about trade-offs, but that’s democracy doing its job to improve the system based on today’s realities. If the mayor can persuade the city’s most trusted advocates and lawyers to negotiate a modernized right to real housing, he will have done something much harder and more effective than keeping his campaign promise to freeze the rent. He will have meaningfully changed the system so New York City can finally solve the homelessness problem it has been managing for decades.
Mark Hurwitz is an adjunct professor at Hunter School of Urban Policy and Leadership. He was a deputy commissioner at the City Department of Homeless Services.
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