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The city planned to let the Mainchance drop-in center’s contract expire. But a judge wants to take a closer look, citing the high need for homeless services during a housing crisis.
With a June 30 deadline looming, an East Midtown homeless drop-in center will stay open past the end of its current contract, a state Supreme Court Judge ruled Thursday afternoon.
Mainchance, a homeless resource center on East 32nd Street just off Park Avenue, has served walk-in clients with meals, programming, and chairs to sleep in for over 35 years.
Judge Lynn Kotler prevented the city from terminating the facility’s contract, which would have expired at the end of June, issuing a temporary restraining order Thursday afternoon. In a court hearing, Kotler expressed concern about shutting down a center serving the homeless during a housing crisis.
The Department of Homeless Services (DHS) had said it is closing the site so it can move resources to other types of homeless services instead. The agency had previously pointed to performance issues at Mainchance.
“Sometimes DHS has to make difficult decisions,” said Elisa Lee, counsel for the city, in court Thursday.
DHS declined to comment further on the issue, citing the ongoing litigation.
It’s another blow to the city’s homeless service agency’s siting plans. Earlier this year, DHS announced it would move the city’s intake for homeless adults from the crumbling Bellevue shelter, also in Midtown East, to a new site on the Lower East Side. But a judge halted that move late last month, after residents who live near the downtown replacement location sued.
Two new hotel shelters in Brooklyn, planned to offset the lost beds from Bellevue’s closure, are also facing resistance from the local community, City Limits reported last month.
Marc Gross, a lawyer who sits on Mainchance’s board and is representing the center in court, said he was relieved they’ll get a chance to make their case to stay open.
“In the context of the housing and homeless crisis it’s hard to understand why this is happening,” said Gross.
Advocates had warned that closing Mainchance and Bellevue would leave a dearth of services in East Midtown, a highly trafficked area. But DHS maintained that three other drop-in centers in Manhattan would continue to serve the homeless population there, and that they would work with Mainchance’s clients to find new placements as needed.
Lawyers for the city maintained that DHS has a right not to renew expiring contracts as it sees fit. They said that the closure is part of a shift to other types of homeless facilities like safe havens, which are also low barrier shelters but have semi-private rooms and beds.
It’s not the first time the city has moved to close down Mainchance. Two years ago, DHS tried to terminate the drop-in’s contract prematurely, also citing a change in strategy.
Kotler, also the judge in that case, blocked the early termination.
As the contract renewal approached this summer, DHS notified Mainchance that its investigators had discovered several policy violations at the drop-in site, including staff who turned away clients improperly—allegations that may rise to a breach of contract, the agency said.
Representatives from Mainchance disputed those accusations. Lawyers for the city did not mention that investigation specifically in court Thursday.
“Rather than alerting [Mainchance] to these access-related issues and affording it an opportunity to explain or correct these alleged deficiencies, [DHS’s] solution was to order that Mainchance be shut down altogether, thereby denying access to the facility by all homeless people in the neighborhood being displaced by Mainchance’s closure,” Gross wrote in a motion to halt the decision.
The city said funding for the center is not included in next year’s budget, which kicks in July 1. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration has been working to close a several billion dollar budget gap.
Kotler expressed concern that fiscal issues might lead to a reduction in homeless services. “They cannot terminate the contract, they have to find a way to pay for it,” the judge said.
Mainchance will continue to operate through at least Aug. 11, when the parties are due back in court.
Here’s what else happened in housing this week—
ICYMI, from City Limits:
- As the summer weather heats up, students in some city public school buildings still don’t have air conditioning in common areas like gyms, auditoriums and cafeterias—something education advocates are pushing to change.
- Thousands of New York households could lose their food assistance benefits this month thanks to new federal work requirements. The city’s nonprofits are scrambling to help people line up work or volunteer hours to maintain their access to SNAP, which helps low-income residents pay for groceries.
- Meet Sunny Nagpaul, who joined City Limits last week to report on NYCHA and the more than 500,000 New Yorkers who live in public housing.
ICYMI, from other local newsrooms:
- More than 57,000 rent-stabilized apartments in the city were vacant as of April 2025, Gothamist reports. Advocates caution that the number includes apartments in newly constructed buildings where tenants had yet to move in, as well those temporarily between renters. But real estate group says it reaffirms their position that rent regulations make it too hard for owners to pay for the renovations needed to bring apartments back online.
- The city’s rezoning of East New York, passed a decade ago, brought thousands of new rentals to the neighborhood—without displacing existing residents, as some had feared, according to The City Reporter.
- Most landlords won’t be hard-hit by a rent freeze for tenants in stabilized apartments, as Mayor Mamdani campaigned for, according to a new analysis reported on by the New York Times.
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