The highest number of children in nearly a decade were staying in New York City’s homeless shelters last year, according to a data dashboard unveiled by the comptroller’s office Thursday.
As homelessness rates among the youngest New Yorkers continue to surge, nearly 30,000 children in 2023 were living in shelters, according to the data.
The stats are part of a new database launched by Comptroller Brad Lander's office that offers a comprehensive, monthly view of the city’s ongoing homelessness crisis as rents rise and affordable housing options shrink across the five boroughs. The dashboard is going live as the city continues to grapple with a rise in migrants entering the city’s Department of Homeless Services shelter system and a new network of temporary facilities, along with other New Yorkers struggling to secure and maintain permanent housing.
“We urgently need to combat the homelessness crisis and we’ve got a lot better shot of managing it if we measure it, if we look at the data clearly, if we try to find the patterns,” Lander told Gothamist in an interview.
The public dashboard, which will be updated monthly as the city releases periodic data, details New York City’s shelter population by age, race and family composition, while also tracking eviction rates and shelter exits dating back to 2015.
An average of 13,000 children 5 years old or younger spent a night in a DHS shelter last year, a 47% increase from 2022. The nightly average increase was even sharper for teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 — up 64% in 2023 than the year prior. The nightly average shelter population for kids aged 6 to 13 also rose by 58%, data shows.
While thousands of migrant families with children reside in DHS facilities, Lander’s age-specific data excludes kids living in other city-run shelters created in the past two years to specifically house recently arrived immigrants.
Gabriela Sandoval Requena, policy director at the organization New Destiny Housing and a leader in the Family Homelessness Coalition, called the findings unsurprising given the dearth of housing options and the lingering economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on low-income families.
Sandoval Requena, whose organization runs housing for victims of domestic violence, said the sharp increase demonstrates the need for more housing and stronger interventions to help people cover rent.
“Housing is the key solution that the state and city need to invest in,” she said. “We know shelter stays can be traumatizing. The shorter the shelter stay, the better.”
Overall, about more than 120,000 people are spending each night in a city-run homeless shelter, including DHS sites and facilities set up for migrants and run by other agencies — up 63% in the current fiscal year, according to the comptroller’s database.
Meanwhile, the Adams administration has helped 11% more New Yorkers exit shelter every month through subsidy programs this fiscal year, compared to last year, typically through a housing subsidy known as CityFHEPS that pays the bulk of the rent. The number of move-outs into permanent housing of any kind increased by 17%, according to DHS data.
That rate of exits from shelters into subsidized housing mirrors the rate of non-migrants entering Homeless Services facilities, but falls short of the overall rise in the shelter population, the data shows.
DHS spokesperson Neha Sharma said the agency attributes 75% of the rise in its shelter census since 2022 to newly arrived migrants entering the homeless services system. The DHS shelter census has increased from about 47,000 people at the start of 2022, when a statewide eviction freeze and several pandemic-related assistance programs were in place, to about 86,000 people today.
Lander said his office was inspired to create the database by a similar project launched by the news site City Limits at the start of 2022, and continuously updated amid the rise in migrants entering the shelter system.
Gothamist has also tracked the sharp rise in evictions over the past two years, following the end of a statewide freeze on most legal lockouts. Marshals completed roughly 12,000 evictions last year, approaching eviction levels from prior to the pandemic, city data shows.
Lander said he would like to drill down further on the experiences of people staying in shelters specifically housing migrants. He said he wants to accurately track exits from those shelters and find where migrants go after mandatory 30- or 60-day move-outs.
“The city is just booting people out with really no attention to and not gathering any information about how they're landing,”