As Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration races to get people living on city streets indoors amid a deadly cold snap, the Department of Social Services is moving ahead with a new rule that advocates warn will make it even harder for people to find shelter.
The rule change, which was put in motion by former Mayor Eric Adams and goes into effect Feb. 12, requires city caseworkers to have evidence a person lived on the streets or has been in and out of shelters for at least six months before they qualify for a bed in “low-barrier transitional housing sites,” which includes stabilization beds and safe havens.
The Department of Homeless Services has argued it needs the new restrictions so it can prioritize longer-term homeless people a limited number of beds, but advocates fear it will create barriers for shelters explicitly designed to be easier for vulnerable people to access.
“We appreciate the fact that the number of safe haven and stabilization beds is limited,” said Virginia Shubert, a policy advisor for Housing Works. “But the solution is not to create new barriers to access.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeless services deferred to City Hall for comment.
“Our Administration is still reviewing the prior administration’s rule on this issue,” said Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for Mamdani.
Rauschenbach added that during cold blue weather the new rule about safe haven entries would be waived and pointed Mamdani’s efforts to bring people indoors during the cold snap, including the expedited opening of a safe haven in Lower Wall Street that had stalled under the Adams administration and a new PSA urging people to come indoors rolled out on LinkNYC kiosks this week.
The city has around 4,000 safe haven and stabilization beds, which both offer alternatives to traditional dorm-style shelters with strict rules and little privacy. Many people living on New York City streets say that they do so because they’ve had bad experiences in traditional city shelters, and feel safer outdoors.
“I’m not going to a shelter because it’s not safe,” recalled Eduardo Ventura, a 40-year-old who grew up in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx. He has spent much of his adult life living on trains and in parks across the city before taking a safe haven bed in 2024 with the assistance of the nonprofit advocacy group The Safety Net Project.
Ventura said he was regularly harassed by the NYPD and DHS workers during his years on the street, but not offered a single room.
“If it was to a congregate shelter where I know the system is not working, I wasn’t going,” he recalled.
Even though he spent years outdoors, he’s not sure if there would have been formal city records qualifying him for safe haven bed under the new system, which require people be registered in the city’s own Street Smart or CARES systems that respectively track people living on the streets and those staying in shelters.
“For me it doesn’t make sense,” Ventura said.
Early on during his time in office Mayor Eric Adams made new investments to expand the number of safe haven beds in the city. But later on, as he faced a surge of asylum seekers that pushed the city’s shelter system to the brink, he tightened some of the rules, limiting the amount of time migrants could stay in shelters.
He first to implement the new restrictions back in 2024 through an internal policy change that specifically excluded asylum seekers from low-barrier shelter beds.
The Safety Net Project sued, and the Adams administration eventually temporarily withdrew the change, saying they would go through a formal rule making process that they initiated last fall.
At a public hearing on the proposed change in November, Anthony Feliciano Housing Works Vice President for Community Mobilization, called the new system “simply unconscionable.”
“To require them to endure street homelessness or bounce in and out of congregate shelter for an extended period of time before offering assistance is cruel and antithetical to the goals of low-barrier housing assistance,” Feliciano wrote.
The rule finally adopted by the Department of Social Services didn’t mention excluding asylum seekers from safe haven beds, as the administration had initially proposed.
While there are exceptions to the rule for people with physical health, mental health or substance use issues, the rule now requires an assistant commissioner to personally sign off on any exceptions, which advocates fear would create unnecessary logjams.
