Primary Voter Guide: The Mayoral Candidates’ Plans on Homelessness

With homelessness at record highs, City Limits asked the candidates where they stand on shelters and housing vouchers, street and subway homelessness, and supportive housing.

This story was updated on June 16 to reflect additional information shared by Adrienne Adams’ and Michael Blake’s campaigns.

With early voting in the primary for mayor beginning this Saturday, June 14, the race for the Democratic nomination is reaching its conclusion.

New York City faces a historic housing crisis that is pushing more and more families into homelessness. Homelessness also reached a new peak nationwide in 2024, according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

In September 2024, a record 148,000 New Yorkers were staying in New York City’s homeless shelters, according to City Limits’ shelter tracker. The past two years, New York also had the highest counts of unsheltered homeless on streets and subways in a decade, at over 4,100 people. (The annual street homeless count is a rough estimate).

Down slightly from its peak during the migrant crisis, New York City’s homeless shelters are still home to over 120,000 New Yorkers, according to the most recent data—equivalent to about the size of Hartford, Connecticut.

Nearly every mayoral candidate has emphasized that solutions for homelessness are dependent on bringing down the cost of housing, which New Yorkers have consistently ranked among their key concerns. In a recent Emerson poll, 30 percent of respondents ranked housing affordability as the top issue facing the city. (a separate City Limits’ guide to the primary candidates’ housing plans is forthcoming).

“We have not addressed the singular issue and that is the lack of affordable housing options for people in need,” said Adolfo Abreu, housing campaigns director at VOCAL-NY. “It’s far easier to just sweep the problem under the rug and to penalize people instead of actually having an honest conversation about what are the proven solutions that work and how we can invest in those solutions to scale to meet the need.” 

With 11 candidates on the ballot, nine candidates qualified to participate in the first mayoral debate last week, and seven more leading candidates who debated again Thursday night, there’s a lot to sort through, and many hundreds of pages of campaign promises.

Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has led the pack in the polls from the jump, hovering at over 30 percent in polling averages, but recent polls have shown a narrowing race. State Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, representing Astoria, is leading the chasers, after a late May Emerson College Poll found him winning 23 percent of first place votes. 

Behind the two frontrunners are New York City Comptroller Brad Lander (selected as the “best choice for mayor” by a panel of 15 experts convened by New York Times Opinion), former Comptroller Scott Stringer, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, and State Senator Zellnor Myrie.

City Limits is breaking down where the candidates stand on three key homelessness issues: shelters and housing vouchers, homeless sweeps and the subway, and supportive housing and “housing first.”

Reducing the shelter population with CityFHEPS

Candidates agree: the city needs to get people out of shelters and into housing. But amid an intense housing crisis, costs are just too high for many families.

One third of New Yorkers pay more than half their income in rent, according to a March report from the Coalition For The Homeless and other housing groups. Three-quarters of extremely low income families pay more than half their income on rent. And city marshals carried out 16,813 evictions last year, the most since the end of pandemic-era eviction moratoria.

The city’s main tool to move homeless New Yorkers out of shelter is city-issued housing vouchers called CityFHEPS that subsidize rent for 55,000 households, according to the Department of Social Services (DSS).

Record numbers of New Yorkers are exiting shelters with vouchers each month, but they face discrimination and limited housing options due to New York City’s tight housing market.

In 2023, the City Council passed laws to expand eligibility for the program, but sitting Mayor Eric Adams (who is skipping the Democratic primary to run in the fall as an independent instead) refused to implement them. Adrienne Adams and the City Council have sued to force his hand.

Every Democratic mayoral candidate except for Andrew Cuomo and Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund manager, has said they would implement the Council’s expansion, according to New York Housing Conference’s policy tracker.

As it serves more people than ever, the CityFHEPS budget has grown five-fold since 2021 to over $1.25 billion. Under Mayor Eric Adams’ administration, the city has been making cuts to the program over concerns about spiraling costs. They recently increased the rental contribution for longer term voucher users, and cut an incentive that helped entice landlords to the program.

Housing advocates have emphasized how essential CityFHEPS is, in spite of its cost and especially given the uncertainty around federal funding for New York City’s housing initatives, including other voucher programs like Section 8.

“It’s expensive but you want [a candidate] to commit to it,” said Brendan Cheney, director of policy and operations at New York Housing Conference. “You need CityFHEPS and a robust housing supply to meaningfully decrease the shelter population.” 

Sean Murray, a member of the Supportive Housing Organized and United Tenants union (SHOUT), is tired of little progress on moving people out of shelters.

He wants candidates to “have a plan for reducing the shelter system because none of them do it. All they do is they say we have to move it and they do nothing.”

When Andrew Cuomo was governor from 2010 to 2018, the state reduced its funding for rental assistance, a move that forced then Mayor Michael Bloomberg to end the Advantage voucher program, a predecessor to CityFHEPS. Groups like the New York State Tenant BLOC claim it contributed to rising homelessness in the city and state.

“Andrew Cuomo created the housing crisis we’re in right now… [he] cannot be trusted to fix the crisis he created,” the Tenants BLOC said in a May statement.

Former Mayor Bill de Blasio also blamed Cuomo’s state government for slashing resources the city needed to serve homeless families, including cost sharing for shelters and supportive housing. “For a decade, state leadership has cut resources that keep New Yorkers in their homes,” de Blasio said in a 2021 letter.

With many of New York City’s housing resources tied to state funding, NYHC’s Cheney said the next mayor should be “making a priority around state level advocacy, that’s one thing you should be focusing on.”

Here’s what the candidates have said about CityFHEPS:

• Cuomo touted significant experience building housing as a former leader of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. As mayor, Cuomo says he would continue using CityFHEPS, while calling for process improvements to how the system works. Similar changes were cited in the plans of City Comptroller Brad Lander and State Senator Jessica Ramos.
  
  But Cuomo also cautioned about the growing budget: “New York City currently spends $1.1 billion in rental subsidies annually in an effort to prevent homelessness, an amount that will continue to grow without addressing the underlying issue of housing supply and affordability,” his plan reads.

• Mamdani and State Sen. Myrie both called for the increased use of the Human Resources Administration’s Master Lease program, where rental subsidies are used to finance the construction of new affordable and supportive housing.

• Speaker Adams called for raising the percentage of units in new construction set aside for homeless New Yorkers, streamlining the application process for vouchers, and touted a guaranteed basic income program for single mothers and their children to help them secure housing. 
• Michael Blake, a former state assemblymember and former vice chair of the Democratic National Committee, said he would raise the voucher amounts and launch a guaranteed income pilot for low-income New Yorkers, in addition to de-concentrating shelters in certain neighborhoods.

Homeless sweeps and the subway

Street homelessness in New York City is also at its highest levels in a decade. And while the 4,000 or so street homeless people are a small piece of the total population experiencing homelessness, they are some of the city’s most visible.

High profile incidents, like when a Brooklyn woman was lit on fire on the Q train in December, have concerned New Yorkers traveling on the subway, and reinvigorated discussion about public safety and the needs of street homeless New Yorkers experiencing mental health crises.

Liz Glazer, founder of policy journal Vital City and an expert on crime, pointed out that many forms of crime are down in New York, but that “the impulsive crimes of people who may not be well or have other kinds of stresses on them, those are going up like crazy.”

Anxiety over random crimes ignited debate among candidates about the right approach to homelessness in the subways and the street. Mayor Adams has increased the presence of law enforcement in the transit system, and increased the number of homeless sweeps, in which the city clears public encampments. But those sweeps resulted in few homeless getting placed in housing.

During his time as governor, Cuomo was likewise focused on moving unhoused people off of subways. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, he shuttered overnight train service for months so crews could disinfect cars, which many criticized for its impact on homeless New Yorkers seeking refuge in the system. 

Groups advocating for the homeless want the next mayor to focus on outreach and housing, rather than sweeps they say criminalize homelessness.

“Cuomo’s approach is a failed approach. Because you’re just literally shuttering and shuffling people throughout the system and throughout the city,” said VOCAL’s Abreu. “That kind of like, performative process of ‘I’m gonna remove them,’ but then they’re gonna show up tomorrow or a couple of hours later because you’re not providing them the stability of housing.” 

VOCAL is a grassroots advocacy group organizing with individuals experiencing homelessness. They endorsed Mamdani as their top choice, and urged supporters not to rank Cuomo.

Here’s what the candidates have said about homelessness and the transit system:

• Cuomo at Thursday’s mayoral debate pledged: “I will take every homeless person off the trains and the subway stations and get them the help they need.” In addition to those sweeps, he’s called for improved engagement with street homeless people, coordinating a cross-agency “Street Population Management Unit” to connect those experiencing mental health crises with services.

• Mamdani wants to create a new $363 million Department of Public Safety, where trained social workers would take over subway response, transferring responsibilities from co-response teams with both police and outreach workers to trained specialists. He wants to triple the size of the subway mobile response team that can connect people with treatment, support services, or housing.

• Lander criticized Eric Adams’ management of the Continuum of Care, the local city network coordinating homeless services. He called for improving and expanding street outreach teams and restructuring the city’s framework for mental health emergency response, with an emphasis on making sure mental health professionals are always involved and distinguishing between crisis and non-crisis interventions.
• Adrienne Adams supports expanding outreach programs to connect unhoused New Yorkers to essential services. She called for fully staffing NYPD’s transit unit and piloting a program that uses violence interrupters to de-escalate random conflicts.

• Several other candidates called for more outreach: Myrie wants an increase in uniformed police, targeted at hot spots above and below ground. He wants to train 150 police and to deploy trios made up of clinicians and officers in the system 24/7, and construct new stabilization centers in each borough.
  
  Blake wants to hire 1,000 mental health professionals to deliver compassionate specialized care to the street homeless.
  
  Stringer also called for transit-specific teams, and wants to increase police presence at key hubs during rush hour.

Glazer emphasized that management of the current and future resources for homeless outreach will be crucial to any successful subway strategy.

“The city already spends an enormous amount of money on outreach, on homeless services, on mental health services, on all kinds of things,” said Glazer. “What is missing from that is some kind of air traffic controller to figure out who is going where and when, who has the right kinds of resources to address the particular kind of issue that the person they’re encountering has, because it is not a one-size-fits-all situation.”

If a mayor is going to make a dent, “I think you need somebody who understands how government works, and an absolutely relentless manager, or [someone who] understands that that’s the person who has to be appointed to run this.” 

Supportive housing and ‘Housing First’

In order to get people out of shelter or off the street, experts say, they need housing options to move to. But the city has a shortage of affordable housing, and even fewer available supportive housing units that serve homeless individuals and families with particular needs.

“In a city with more than 820,000 extremely low-income (ELI) households, only 2,063 newly constructed units of housing affordable to ELI households were completed in 2024,” wrote the Coalition for the Homeless in its annual report, released Thursday.

A growing body of evidence suggests that housing is essential to helping people who need mental health, substance abuse, and other wraparound services. The “housing first” approach allows people to enter housing without proving sobriety, filling out onerous paperwork, or staying in shelter for a period of time. Those who get housing first are less likely to return to homelessness and more likely to stay housed long term.

Mayor Adams has invested in shelters with lower barriers to entry and more privacy, called safe havens, which many homeless New Yorkers prefer. According to DSS, the administration built 1,200 new safe haven and stabilization beds online during the administration, with a goal of bringing the citywide total to nearly 4,500 by the end of 2025.

The mayor also launched a pilot program in 2022 that moved 80 formerly street-homeless New Yorkers into vacant supportive housing units, without their having to go through the usual, lengthier placement process. 

“New York has had the philosophy of housing first, maybe imperfectly,” said NYHC’s Cheney. 

But he emphasized it’s hard to actualize that philosophy when there aren’t enough safe havens, stabilization beds, or supportive housing units available to get people housed so they can get help. 

The problem, he elaborated, starts upstream. “It’s really hard to fully carry that out without supply. If you don’t have it, it’s hard to run a really good housing first model,” Cheney said.

After a series of shared city-state supportive housing plans called the New York/New York (NY/NY) Agreements expired in 2015, the city had to take up supportive housing production on its own. Under 2015’s “NY 15/15” plan, New York City pledged to build 15,000 supportive housing units over 15 years. But it is far behind schedule, and only on track to build about half of the proposed units by 2030.

Moses Gates, vice president of housing and neighborhood planning for the Regional Plan Association (RPA), said scaling up “housing first” programs “is largely a question of money and budgeting.” 

“It does take a strong city, state partnership,” Moses said.

Sean Murray, a supportive housing resident and member of SHOUT, emphasized that local resistance to supportive housing has limited options and slowed construction of new developments.

“It has to be forced down the throat of New Yorkers that we have a right to live in every community in the city,” said Murray. “Any mayoral candidate that does not make that commitment, I don’t know if I can vote for them.” 

Some candidates have pledged to get supportive housing construction back on track:

• Cuomo says he’d provide $2.6 billion in capital funding over five years to build at least 600 new units per year for homeless adults with serious mental illness or substance use disorders as part of the 15/15 plan.

• Mamdani endorsed a housing first approach and said he wanted to expand supportive housing options, but didn’t provide specific details in his plan.

• Comptroller Lander has pushed for a housing first approach as comptroller, and would continue that approach as mayor in his plan to end street homelessness. He pledged to reverse Cuomo-era changes that shifted the cost burden of shelters to the city. He also pledged to follow through on the city’s 15/15 plan and negotiate a new NY/NY commitment from the state to help build supportive housing.

• Adrienne Adams suggested activating vacant land for supportive housing (Scott Stringer did too). Adams also pledged to negotiate a new deal with the state to help finance supportive housing construction, and called for a housing first approach in written comments to City Limits. She wants to increase residential treatment beds for people with severe mental illness to 250, from just 59 currently.
• Blake wants to generate funding for wraparound services in supportive housing by taxing vacant luxury units and recovering uncollected fines and fees, while making sure nonprofits get paid faster. He endorsed a housing first approach in written comments to City Limits.

• Myrie, Adams, and Ramos each expressed support for housing first approaches in their plans and public comments, but didn’t provide detailed supportive housing targets and did not respond to City Limits’ request for comment.

The next mayor will have their hands full on housing and homelessness. “The crisis is getting worse and worse and we need a transformative, realistic approach to solve these issues,” said VOCAL-NY’s Abreu.

Early voting for the primary starts Saturday. Primary Day is June 24. You can look up your local poll site here. Check your voter registration status here.

Janiah Lindsey contributed reporting for this article.

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