Layoffs loom at NYC street homeless outreach groups due to $4M budget cut

Groups on the frontlines of New York City’s street homelessness crisis fear they’ll be forced to lay off dozens of staffers next month due to a $4 million funding cut included in this year’s city government budget, the Daily News has learned.

Ever since 2019, the city Department of Homeless Services has annually allocated $8 million in so-called “hotspot funding” for non-profit groups that deploy staff who provide New Yorkers living on the streets with medical care and try to convince them to enter shelter or other housing.

However, the municipal government’s 2025 fiscal year budget adopted in June by Mayor Adams and the City Council only renewed the hotspot funding at $4 million covering the first six months of the fiscal year — meaning the allocation is set to dry up on Jan. 1. There were discussions at the time the budget passed that the second half of the funding would be allocated later in the year.

Now, the Department of Homeless Services has asked the mayor’s budget office to earmark another $4 million to cover the second half of the 2025 fiscal year, according to Homeless Services United Executive Director Kristin Miller, who has been privy to internal conversations and represents dozens of organizations that receive hotspot funding.

But as of late Tuesday, that request had yet to be approved by the budget office — a detail Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park hinted at during a Council hearing earlier in the day.

“This isn’t a place where we’re requesting a cut, but where we’re working with [the mayor’s budget office] to address funding needs on a year by year basis,” Wasow Park, who oversees the Department of Homeless Services, testified at the hearing after Manhattan Councilwoman Gale Brewer questioned why the funding is about to run out.

“We need the $8 million back,” Brewer told Wasow Park. “We do not need it cut. We are losing people who would be keeping those off the streets.”

Spokespeople for the mayor’s office and Wasow Park’s agency didn’t immediately return requests for comment.

With the expiration date rapidly approaching, Miller’s group and other homeless outreach organizations are looking for help.

The Manhattan Outreach Consortium, which comprises multiple street homeless outreach groups operating in the borough, has in recent weeks privately urged the mayor’s office to restore the full hotspot funding stream, according to sources involved in those talks.

A fact-sheet circulated among local lawmakers says the Manhattan Outreach Consortium alone would lose out on $2.7 million in annual funding under the cut. That reduction would result in Manhattan providers needing to next month lay off 35 of the 143 outreach workers they currently have in the borough, according to the fact-sheet.

Before the enactment of hotspot funding in 2019, the Manhattan Outreach Consortium on average got 207 street homeless individuals into housing per year, the fact-sheet said. Since hotspot funding kicked in, that number has climbed to 273, the document noted.

The budget issues emerging over the hotspot funds come as street homelessness is surging in New York City.

According to the city’s annual street homelessness census in January, there were 4,140 unsheltered individuals living outside in the five boroughs. That marked a 2.4% increase from 2023 and a 20.3% increase from 2022, the census shows.

Mayor Adams has said he considers combatting street homelessness a priority. He has focused in particular on breaking up street encampments, an issue he touched on during a town hall event on the Upper West Side on Monday night.

“We had encampments everywhere,” he said at the event, referring to when he took office in January 2022. “We made an agreement that we were going to take all the encampments down and put people into care. We were beat up. We were beat up. People said, ‘No, people have a right to sleep on the street with no shoes at 13-degree weather and yell and scream and walk the street.’ I said, ‘Like hell they do.’ That’s what it took.”

With Josephine Stratman