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Nearly 2,600 Apartments for Mentally Ill and Homeless People Sit Vacant

Mayor Eric Adams is opening more supportive housing in New York, but filling it can be a challenge.

Mayor Eric Adams, in a purple tie and suit, stands at a podium with pursed lips.
Mayor Eric Adams has made addressing homelessness a focus of his administration, but has faced many challenges. Credit...Benjamin Norman for The New York Times

Placing New York’s homeless and mentally ill in housing that comes with social services, a key to keeping people from living in the streets and subways, is proving to be a challenge for the city.

Mayor Eric Adams has embraced these projects, and on Thursday announced the opening of two more.

But figures the city released this week in response to a Freedom of Information Act request show that despite the intense demand for supportive housing apartments, nearly 2,600 of them are vacant. That is enough apartments to house most of the 3,400 people living in streets or subways as of January.

There are now more empty supportive housing apartments than in March, when Mr. Adams declared war on the bureaucratic “dysfunctionality” that can keep eligible homeless people waiting for apartments for years. Since July, the number of vacant apartments has grown by more than 1,000, according to city officials.

The application process for a supportive housing apartment is onerous, requiring extensive documentation many homeless people find hard to marshal, along with multiple rounds of mental health evaluations. Even so, during the 12 months ending in July, 7,400 people or families had their applications for supportive housing approved, according to a report the city released in September.

But only 1,200 of those applicants — 16 percent — received an apartment, and not all of them moved in. Over a quarter of applicants who had been homeless for over a year were not even referred for a housing interview. And the number of people who moved from streets and subways into supportive housing during that period was a minuscule 16.

There are numerous sources of delay in finding an apartment for someone with an approved supportive housing application, advocates say.

Matching an applicant to an appropriate opening — there are different varieties of such housing — is difficult. The process is usually handled by the city’s Human Resources Administration. Applicants often undergo numerous interviews with housing providers and can end up on wait lists for months. Housing providers often reject applicants who they say need more support than their programs can supply.

Rosa Jaffe, the director of social work in the civil practice at Bronx Defenders, who has many clients searching for supportive housing, said that landlords often refuse to rent to people with criminal histories.

Underlying it all is the fact that the number of qualified applicants far exceeds the supply of apartments.

In March, after The New York Post reported that 2,500 supportive housing apartments sat vacant, Mr. Adams promised quick action.

“How do you have a vacant apartment, when you need people to be in the apartment and you have so much paperwork that they can’t get in the apartment?” he asked. “That is not how I’m going to run this city.”

On July 1, a deputy commissioner of the city’s Human Resources Administration, Ryan Murray, told the City Council that the number of empty supportive housing units was “below 1,500.”

But on Monday, the city, responding to a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Safety Net Project of the Urban Justice Center, said that there were “2,585 vacant (online) units.”

It is not clear how the city came to have 1,100 more unused supportive housing apartments than it did in July. The city said Thursday that of 2,500 units vacant in March, 911 of those remain empty. It also said that some of the total of 2,585 units currently vacant were newly opened.

The city also said that it had considerably accelerated the pace at which it placed tenants into supportive housing. From March to October, the city said, it filled 2,000 supportive housing apartments, almost as many as the 2,100 apartments it filled in the entire year of 2021 under Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio.

The two new projects announced on Thursday were one in Dumbo, Brooklyn, containing 305 apartments in a former hotel owned by the Jehovah’s Witnesses; and another at a former tuberculosis sanitarium at the city-run Queens Hospital Center that includes 200 apartments, 75 of them reserved for formerly homeless people with histories of heavy use of emergency rooms.

One new resident of the Queens project, Jesus Cerda, spoke at the mayor’s news conference at the site on Thursday. Mr. Cerda said he had a mental breakdown while living in a shelter, had been hospitalized, and was released back to the shelter “feeling hopeless and scared.” After applying for supportive housing, he was given a studio apartment in the Queens building in July.

“It is truly a fantastic feeling to have tranquillity, the ability to cook my meals and focus on my next steps in life,” he said.

But for every person who gets a supportive housing apartment, there are four eligible applicants who are turned away, according to the Supportive Housing Network of New York.

One applicant who has been trying to get into supportive housing is Lourdes Melo, 43, who has been living on a relative’s couch in Brooklyn for two and a half years.

Ms. Melo, who has bipolar disorder and is on medication, said that after she filed her application with help of a supportive housing specialist at a nonprofit, she did not hear back from him for months.

Then she learned that her application had expired and that she needed to start the entire process over again. She filed a second application in the spring and is waiting to begin the process of trying to find an apartment.

“New York is one of the richest states in America, and the fact that the needs of the most vulnerable citizens are not being met is frustrating, it’s angering,” she said.

Andy Newman writes about social services and poverty in New York City and its environs. He has covered the New York metropolitan area for The Times for 25 years and written nearly 4,000 stories and blog posts. More about Andy Newman

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