Speaking at a press conference in front of Bellevue hospital, Mayor Eric Adams shed light on a $650 million push over five years from City Hall to combat homelessness. In announcing the allocation of those funds in his State of the City address last week, Adams revealed that a portion of it would go to “a new housing facility just for unsheltered New Yorkers with serious mental illness,” though he did not specify at the time how much, and was also spare with details such as how many people it would accommodate. Today, the mayor fleshed out the plan, dubbed “Bridge to Home,” which he said would “meet New Yorkers where they are and provide a supportive facility that gets them the treatment and temporary housing they need while keeping them out of the hospitals and off our subways.”
The program would be administered by NYC Health + Hospitals, New York’s municipal health system which runs a network of 11 hospitals. People participating in Bridge to Home would get “their own room, in a setting where we will have on-site services so we can maintain their recovery,” according to the system’s president and CEO Dr. Mitchell Katz. “When people are ready we will be able to move them to permanent housing.”
Answering a reporter’s question about a schedule for the program’s launch, Dr. Katz stated that “the timetable is immediate,” although according to a press release from the mayor’s office, “NYC Health + Hospitals expects to ramp the program up in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026 and fully operationalize it in FY27, serving up to 100 beds.” Officials at today’s briefing did not specify what portion of the $650 million allocated over the next five years to combat homelessness will go to this program.
The announcement of Bridge to Home comes as homelessness has spiked more than fifty percent in just the last year, according to a report by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The federal agency reported more than 158,000 homeless New Yorkers across the city, a substantial portion of the 771,000 national total. 81 out of every 10,000 New Yorkers are homeless, according to HUD’s data.
Local officials and mental health advocates have criticized the mayor’s choices during his tenure in dealing with the issue. In an opinion piece published in City & State today, City Councilwomen Tiffany Cabán and Sandy Nurse argue that leadership from City Hall and Albany engage in “expensive politicking [that] has failed to make New Yorkers feel safe and can no longer replace a serious commitment to the evidence-based solutions we deserve.” They note the mayor’s cutting of funds for drug treatment programs and “clubhouse” mental health facilities (an innovation in the field considered successful by health professionals), and also called out the mayor for the “symbolic and costly” surge of law enforcement on the subway in response to high-profile violent cases.
In today’s briefing, the mayor claimed that his critics were “sitting back and being philosophical” on the issue.
