Overview
Last updated April 17, 2024Every night, tens of thousands of New Yorkers, mostly families with children, experience homelessness.
Unlike other major cities in the United States, New York City’s right-to-shelter – established through a series of court cases and consent decrees — has ensured that the vast majority of people experiencing homelessness in New York City are able to take refuge within the shelter system. Nearly 95% of New Yorkers experiencing homelessness reside within a City shelter. In most other large U.S. cities, a much higher percentage sleep on the street.
Sheltered homelessness in New York City has risen dramatically over the past twenty-five years. The nightly population in NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters grew 175% between January 2000 and January 2020, from 22,955 to 62,679 individuals. The shelter population remained stubbornly high between 2015 and 2020, and then dropped nearly 25% between the spring of 2020 and 2022, due to temporary eviction moratoria and pandemic rent and income supports. In August 2021 there were 44,586 individuals in DHS shelters, the lowest daily population in nearly ten years.
Beginning in the summer of 2022, New York City began to receive tens of thousands of new asylum seekers, many of whom have sought refuge in City shelters. The combination of these factors has caused the shelter population to balloon over the past two years, with the City providing some form of shelter and services to nearly 120,000 individuals each night. In late 2023, the City began imposing 30- and 60-day limits on shelter stays for many of these individuals.
Over the same time period, the pandemic-era eviction moratorium came to an end, and eviction filings have resumed.
As with entry into shelter, exits from shelter have also shifted over time, as Administrations have changed policy and subsidy programs.
The Office of the New York City Comptroller has developed this dashboard to help New Yorkers track homelessness trends and to monitor the City’s efforts to help more residents move out of shelter into stable housing.
Many solutions are needed to ensure that every New Yorker has a safe, stable, and decent place to live. Creating additional accountability measures and increased access to public data is just one small step towards that objective. Read more about the Comptroller’s work related to homelessness here: Audit of DHS’s Role in the “Cleanups” of Homeless Encampments and accompanying policy report on Housing First; and Review of DHS’s Programs and Services.
Total individuals in New York City Shelters, including asylum seekers.
This page summarizes the total population in shelter, and the number of evictions (as a driver increasing the population in shelter), and subsidized exits from shelter (as a critical way to move individuals to permanent housing and reduce the shelter population).
Filings in housing court by landlords against tenants for non-payment of rent or holdover after the expiration of lease.
Note that a filing does not necessarily result in a tenant being forcibly evicted; see Evictions filed and executed for the breakdown of eviction cases that result in a marshal-executed eviction.
Tenants, especially when they have legal representation, may successfully challenge a suit by a landlord and remain in their home (see Eviction prevention).
However, many tenants leave their apartment when a landlord does not offer a lease extension, or hikes rent, or files a housing court case against the tenant.
Individuals who moved from shelter to permanent housing with rental support payments.
CityFHEPs vouchers have become the primary means of rental assistance; see Exits for breakdown by program. An audit conducted by the NYC Comptroller’s Office found that individuals and families that leave shelter with a “subsidized exit” are much less likely to return to shelter.
Data Sources
The total number of individuals, including asylum seekers, is provided to the Comptroller’s office by the administration but are not available publicly. A portion of this total, the number of individuals in NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS)-run shelters, are available from DHS on NYC OpenData.
Data on the population and demographics of individuals and families in NYC Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelters, as well as the number of Homebase enrollments, are available from DHS through NYC OpenData.
Data on eviction filings and rate of representation are from the New York State Office of Court Administration via the OCA Data Collective. This data has been obtained and made available through the collaborative efforts of the Right to Counsel Coalition, BetaNYC, the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development, the University Neighborhood Housing Program, and JustFix. Computation of the rate of representation follows the methodology developed by the Right to Counsel NYC Coalition for their tracker.
Data on marshal-executed evictions are available from NYC Department of Investigation through NYC OpenData.
Data on exits from shelter through subsidized programs are available from NYC Department of Special Services/Department of Homeless Services through NYC OpenData.