Andrew Cuomo Unveils Blueprint to Get Severely Mentally Ill Homeless People Off the Streets and Into Treatment
Plan Focuses on Both Prevention + Getting Help to Those Already Homeless; Includes $2.6 Billion 5-Year Plan to Rapidly Expand Congregate Supportive Housing in NYC; Fill Essential Workforce Shortages; Establish a Cross-Agency Team to Coordinate Outreach
The mental health and homelessness crisis in New York City is a humanitarian emergency hiding in plain sight. We see it every day—in our overflowing shelters, our streets, our subways. These are not unsolvable problems and we must act with urgency, compassion, and competence. As Mayor, I will rebuild a system that doesn’t just manage dysfunction—it delivers results. We will get people the treatment, housing, and care they need, and restore both dignity and safety to our city.
Governor Cuomo, candidate for Mayor of New York City, today unveiled a comprehensive 14-point blueprint to address New York City’s mental health crisis focused on both prevention for those with serious mental illness at risk of becoming homeless and reaching those who have fallen through the cracks of the current system.
At the center of the plan is a $2.6 billion capital investment to triple the city’s annual production of supportive housing units, from 500 to 1,500, with at least 600 units per year reserved for single adults suffering from serious mental illness or substance use disorders who are homeless.
“The mental health and homelessness crisis in New York City is a humanitarian emergency hiding in plain sight. We see it every day—in our overflowing shelters, our streets, our subways. These are not unsolvable problems and we must act with urgency, compassion, and competence,” Governor Cuomo said. “As Mayor, I will rebuild a system that doesn’t just manage dysfunction—it delivers results. We will get people the treatment, housing, and care they need, and restore both dignity and safety to our city.”
Governor Cuomo’s Mental Health plan is of a scale to match the seriousness of one of the most difficult problems New York City needs to solve. Along with his Public Safety plan and Subway Safety plan, his Mental Health plan will reflect New York City’s best instincts of taking care of its most vulnerable citizens, benefiting individuals with serious mental illness and their families, while improving the quality-of-life of all New Yorkers by helping individuals with serious mental illness who pose a risk to themselves or others.
It costs $52,000 per year, for a single adult shelter bed, and approximately $500,000 per year to house someone at Rikers Island. In either situation for someone with a severe mental illness, they’re not getting the help they need. Under this blueprint, getting them the required aid will help them, offset these other costs, and, in the most extreme cases, protect the public.
Details of the plan include:
- Increase the supply of supportive housing units for the seriously mentally ill: Provide $2.6 billion in capital over five years to build at least 600 new units per year reserved specifically for single adults with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorders who are either homeless or at risk of homelessness. Combined with fully implementing current programs, this will more than triple the number of permanent and congregate supportive housing units New York City has been opening annually – from approximately 500 units a year to 1,600 units per year.
- Expand access to community-based mental health services and supports: Increase access to effective integrated, community-based behavioral health services that integrate services for mental health and substance use disorders by extending clinic hours, incentivizing providers to accept insurance, and investing in flexible, low-barrier treatment models like mental health Clubhouses.
- Utilize technology to expand timely access: Despite considerable federal and state funding for the city’s Suicide and Crisis Lifeline or “988”, associated response services are still underfunded and understaffed, so they are not available on the 24/7 basis that true crisis responsiveness requires. The City should add peer specialists and more mental health professionals to the 988 workforce and connect 988 to the helplines and resources the City provides for other health and social needs. These efforts to keep response times fast and calls satisfactory are necessary to establish the value of 988 as an effective alternative to 911.
- Fill essential workforce shortages: Expand New York City’s critical shortage of mental health workers by recruiting more “peers” who have a shared life experience with clients to the mental health workforce, implementing apprenticeship programs, and partnering with hospitals to expand fellowships for high-need specialties such as child psychiatrists.
- Unify and strengthen New York City’s fragmented behavioral health delivery system: Streamline access through improved coordination among mental health, substance use disorder, and primary care medical services; overhaul New York City’s Single Point of Access system to make it more responsive to high need cases; and enhance data-sharing and accountability across care management agencies and City-State partnerships.
- Address the unique mental health needs of children and adolescents: Expand access to youth mental health care by increasing the number of school-based mental health clinics, increasing the number while preserving existing school-based health centers, and addressing the child behavioral health workforce shortage through targeted training and recruitment.
- Improve outreach and engagement with the street homeless: Establish a centralized, cross-agency Street Population Management Unit to coordinate outreach, data sharing, and case management for New York City’s chronic street homeless population with serious mental illness and/or substance use disorders – transforming fragmented efforts into a unified, accountable system that more strategically deploys services and tracks individual outcomes.
- Expand options for getting the street homeless into shelter, care, and housing: Scale low-barrier housing options such as Safe Haven shelters, crisis stabilization beds, and Housing First apartment units, to promote effective engagement with street homeless individuals with serious mental illness who will not enter the regular shelter system and transition them into long-term housing arrangements.
- Scale up crisis response services: Expand New York City’s crisis response infrastructure by scaling 24/7 mobile crisis teams, securing the City’s fair share of State-funded Crisis Stabilization Centers, and investing in non-police alternatives to respond to crises in which police presence may be counterproductive, as a means to reduce unnecessary hospitalizations and improve outcomes for individuals with serious mental illness.
- Improve utilization of civil inpatient psychiatric beds: Expand transitional residential programs to free up civil inpatient psychiatric bed capacity, ensure all discharges are screened for participation in a strengthened court-mandated Assisted Outpatient Treatment, and better integrate inpatient psychiatric care with aftercare community-based services to prevent the pattern of individuals cycling through the community back to emergency departments and inpatient psychiatric hospitalizations.
- Increase the number of forensic inpatient psychiatric beds: Expand New York City’s forensic psychiatric beds capacity for individuals involved in the criminal justice system by directing NYC Health + Hospitals to add a minimum of 100 to 200 new forensic inpatient psychiatric beds to address the growing number of justice-involved individuals with serious mental illness and keep them out of Rikers Island jails.
- Consistently enforce involuntary removal and involuntary commitment laws: Ensure consistent application of the newly codified “basic needs” standard for involuntary removal and involuntary commitment by strengthening execution and accountability across City agencies; provide an aftercare guarantee upon discharge that includes priority access to intensive community services—such as Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) and Intensive Mobile Treatment (IMT) teams and peer support upon discharge to prevent the cycle of relapse and homelessness.
- Overhaul New York City’s administration of the court-mandated Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) program: Strengthen New York City’s AOT program by mandating universal screening at discharge from H + H hospitals and Rikers Island so that more individuals who would benefit from the program are enrolled, expanding treatment plans to cover a broader range of stability needs than just medication, and piloting a judicially supervised AOT model with regular court monitoring to improve engagement and treatment adherence among individuals with serious mental illness.
- Improve the Criminal Procedure Law Article 730 system for determinations of mental competency to stand trial: Expand forensic bed and clinical assessment capacity, ensuring timely evaluations, and requiring greater accountability from prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judges to ensure individuals with serious mental illness facing criminal charges are properly assessed and diverted to treatment when appropriate.
Governor Cuomo has a decades-long track record of tackling the complex intersection of homelessness, serious mental illness, and substance use disorder. From founding one of New York City’s leading homeless services organizations in his twenties, to serving as Chair of the NYC Commission on the Homeless, to developing the nationally adopted and award-winning Continuum of Care strategy at HUD, Governor Cuomo has brought innovation and accountability to this crisis throughout his career. As Governor, Cuomo made behavioral health a core priority—expanding community-based mental health care, launching thousands of supportive housing units, and increasing access to treatment for more than 200,000 New Yorkers. He championed evidence-based programs like ACT teams and Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinics, while emphasizing early intervention for children and adolescents to prevent lifelong cycles of instability.
Details on Cuomo's Mental Health Plan Available Here
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