In 2024, New York City’s homelessness rate has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. That number has increased 162 percent over the past two years, and as a result school districts are also reporting an increase in homeless students.² One in nine students in the New York City public schools is homeless, and we see racial segregation mapping nearly exactly to the disproportionality of student homelessness in the city.

What has caused this crisis? We were already seeing an uptick in family homelessness over the past decade due to economic factors, including stagnating or decreasing wages in the occupations held by the adults in most of our families experiencing homelessness and the ever-increasing unaffordability of the city’s housing market. We were also already experiencing a housing crisis. Then the eviction moratorium ended when pandemic protections were lifted, and not long after that the governor of Texas decided he wanted to score political points by transporting people to New York en masse.

Upward of 3,000 to 5,000 people started coming every week from the southern border to New York City to stay in our shelters. Previously, we’d get about 50,000 or 60,000 people per year. As of October 2023, it was estimated that 146,000 people were in city-run shelter facilities. So, in less than a year and a half, we almost tripled the number of people in our systems.

Prior to these events, four systems dealt with homelessness in New York City: the Department of Homeless Services, the Human Resource Administration, Housing Preservation and Development, and the Department of Youth and Community Development. The unprecedented influx of new arrivals coupled with an ongoing housing crisis increased the shelter-based population from approximately 50,000 to over 140,000 in less than two years. This resulted in the creation of over 200 emergency shelters across nearly a dozen different city agencies.

There is much talk about this “migrant crisis,” but not enough discussion of what is driving people to leave their home countries. One factor is the long-term legacy of colonialization and the slave trade in the Global South, and more recent stressors include the pandemic, climate change, and global geopolitical instability. People are moving because their families can no longer survive where they are living. Folks are literally fleeing for their lives.

I get emotional when I think about what some of the women who seek help from Win have been through. One woman in particular comes to mind. When she left Caracas, Venezuela, she was pregnant. She left her 3-year-old at home with family but took her 2-year-old with her. She traveled on foot from Caracas to the Darién Gap, a journey of more than 775 miles.³ She was detained by officials in Texas, and then human trafficked by the government of Texas to New York, used as a pawn in dirty political tactics. New York City has joined the political theater enacted by some border states with its creation of cruel and inhuman policies like the 30- and 60-day shelter evictions. Individuals have been forced onto the street, and families with children, like the woman I’ve described here, are being forced to move, to uproot their kids and family every 60 days, purely as a form of harassment to deter usage of shelters. She is arguably being used as a pawn again, this time by the city of New York.

This pregnant mother has had to deal with the traumas that forced her to flee Caracas in the first place, the traumas she experienced on the long journey, the traumas that were visited on her at the border and in detention, and the additional indignities she has experienced since coming to this city. We’re encountering a multilayered level of trauma among these women and families that is truly unique.

Immigration is of course not new to New York City or to the United States. But because most migrants coming here over the past decade have been Black and Indigenous, we are seeing communities react in ways that are hostile rather than welcoming. One of the things we’re navigating is the disproportionality of Black migrants who are being evicted from shelters and who are residing in precarious situations, as the city has more or less said it has “run out of shelter space.”

What are we doing to respond to these realities? Thankfully, some faith communities have stepped in to help, particularly in African communities. These groups have offered to house folks, especially in mosques. We have also been in regular conversation with other religious officials, particularly the Episcopal Diocese of New York.

We all agreed that we needed to do something collective, so we set up a coalition called New York SANE (Sheltering All in Need Equally). Through the coalition a group of faith leaders from various Christian traditions, Muslim mosques, from the Buddhist, Hindu, and Jewish communities, have come together to strategize and put pressure on the government to make sure these newest New Yorkers have safe and adequate places to stay.

The pillars of NY SANE’s advocacy include the following:

• The right to shelter must not be eroded in any way. No human being must ever be relegated to sleeping on the streets.
• Families with children in need of shelter must always be provided with safe placements in facilities with private locking rooms.
• All three levels of government must work together cooperatively to formulate, fund, and implement practical and humane responses to the current humanitarian crisis.
• The influx of asylum seekers and other new arrivals to New York requires a comprehensive statewide decompression and resettlement plan using the full authority and resources of the governor’s office.
• The right to shelter is a floor, not a ceiling. The only real answer to homelessness is housing.

Of course, lack of housing is a risk factor for all kinds of physical and mental health issues. Housing is health care, and the fact of the matter is that we can’t even get to the point of intervention to address mental health conditions because folks don’t have a place to sleep.

One of the things we’re seeing the deeper we get into this crisis is that the multilevel trauma is now starting to trickle out. But we have issues related to cultural accessibility to mental health services and providing linguistic supports for affected groups, particularly in African Indigenous and South American Indigenous languages. I also find myself thinking about how we might bring Indigenous healing practices to the ways we think about supporting these groups.

With regard to mental health, I want to emphasize our work on Local Law 35 (2023). We were part of a coalition of groups, including some religious organizations, who worked with the city council to draft legislation to ensure that there are mental health services in all family homeless shelters in the next five years.

It’s frustrating to witness these intersecting realities and profound inequities continuing to hurt the people we serve when we know what works. Give people housing. We have the research. We know vouchers work; we know that housing reduces all of these detrimental health outcomes. Just give people a place to sleep.

Henry Love, a developmental psychologist and inaugural Obama Foundation US Leaders Fellow, is vice president of public policy and strategy at Women in Need (Win) Inc., the nation’s largest shelter provider to families experiencing homelessness. In this role he has advised members of the New York City Council, New York State legislature, US Congress, and the Biden Administration on policy solutions to ending child and family homelessness.