Twenty people did not die on our streets this winter because they were not involuntarily removed, or because there wasn’t an available apartment. Twenty people died because NYC spends hundreds of millions of dollars on a hodgepodge of services with no one accountable. Someone must be in an advanced medical or psychiatric crisis before anything is done. New York must do better for those dying slowly on our streets.

NYC has experienced an uptick of unhoused people on our streets and subways. An array of factors led to this, including the opioid epidemic, a shortage of affordable housing, and the elimination of psychiatric beds.

The city rightfully moved away from policies that criminalized homelessness, but it did not effectively replace incarceration with a better pathway to stability. In a decade, spending on street outreach increased by more than 1,000% — now exceeding $300 million a year — while unsheltered homelessness increased by 22%.

The shelter system is the only way to connect to permanent housing, but people don’t want to go to a shelter they believe is unsafe, lacks privacy, and is not in the neighborhood they call home. This is why there are 2,500 empty supportive housing units in NYC.

Mayor Mamdani inherited this dysfunctional system. Instead of looking to the past to assign blame, we can look to the past for solutions.

We urge Mamdani to look at two programs that have demonstrated success. In 2002, Breaking Ground and the Times Square Alliance created a program that bypassed the shelter and allowed individuals to go directly to permanent housing. With a lead caseworker focusing on each individual, homelessness decreased by 99%. The city took notice and overhauled outreach contracts to reward permanent placements. Then, we forgot what worked.

In 2022, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg funded a Neighborhood Navigator Initiative (NNI), where peer navigators conduct outreach, build trust, and connect individuals with services. This program should continue as part of the proposed Department of Community Safety as community mental health navigators.

The NNI works successfully as part of the Midtown Community Improvement Coalition, which brings together the community, the DA’s office, city officials, city agencies, precinct councils, social service providers, and peer navigators. We work together on results.

These initiatives succeeded because they are focused on the individual. The mayor is right that housing is essential, and permanent housing should be the goal for each person on the street. But for the people who have lived on the streets for years, declining services hundreds of times, the system isn’t working. The core problem is a lack of coordination, communication, and accountability.

City Hall can learn from these successes and reform its approach to street homelessness. The city needs its primary goal to be connecting street homeless clients with permanent housing tailored to the needs of each individual. Outreach workers, peer navigators, housing placement providers, emergency response personnel, and hospitals must share information, work together and be held accountable.

While the city works towards reform, the Times Square Alliance, the Garment District Alliance, and supportive housing provider Volunteers of America — which has already worked with the Department of Social Services on a successful pilot entitled Street to Home — stand ready to launch a neighborhood-based direct street to home program in West Midtown. This pilot integrates street outreach with supportive permanent housing, bypassing transitional shelter placements.

We know what works — let’s do it before 20 more people die.

Harris is president of the Times Square Alliance. Blair is president of the Garment District Alliance.

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