Eric Adams to prioritize supportive housing in upcoming NYC budget

New York City Mayor Eric Adams plans to revamp a major city initiative to create supportive housing for vulnerable New Yorkers by producing nearly 6,000 additional congregate apartments with on-site health and social services. This new commitment is aimed at reversing the city’s uneven progress on its goal to significantly grow its supportive housing supply by 2028. 

The news, shared exclusively with City & State, will be announced on Monday as Adams unveils a handful of new housing-related investments included in his upcoming executive budget proposal for fiscal year 2026. The mayor typically releases his executive budget proposal in April, launching the final negotiation process with the City Council before the budget is due at the end of June.

The Adams administration plans to reconfigure an initiative known as the New York City 15/15 Supportive Housing Initiative by shifting its focus entirely to the congregate, single-site model going forward. Originally announced by former Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2015, the initiative set a goal for the city to create 15,000 units of supportive housing – low-cost apartments paired with health, substance use, mental health or social services – by the end of 2030. Adams later moved that timeline up to 2028. It was a big commitment, bringing with it the potential to significantly grow the city’s ranks of what was then about 32,000 supportive housing units.

But while the city is on track to exceed its target to produce 7,500 congregate units (housing where tenants living in one designated building receive on-site supportive services), little progress has been made on its other target to create 7,500 scattered site units. Though the latter is still a form of supportive housing, it differs from the congregate model in the sense that individual units are spread out in privately-owned apartment buildings across the city and tenants generally receive supportive services at a separate location. With only 1.4% of rental apartments in the city vacant as of the latest housing and vacancy survey, supportive housing providers have struggled to find private market units to rent. 

A City Hall spokesperson said they were unable to provide the latest data on how many scattered site units the city has created to date, but Politico reported that a mere 1,092 units had been completed as of last spring. None of those had reportedly been completed under the Adams administration.

Doubling down on what has worked and hoping to push forward progress as the 2028 deadline looms, Adams plans to shift the 15/15 initiative’s focus to solely center on creating congregate units going forward. The city will spend an additional $46 million over the coming few fiscal years to finance 5,850 of these units – 4,550 of which will be newly created and 1,300 of which will be preserved, according to a spokesperson for the mayor.

Following the mayor’s announcement Monday morning, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams touted the shifted focus and commitment as another victory for the City Council’s City for All housing plan, which the body proposed last year in response to the mayor’s City of Yes housing zoning proposal. Additional funding to build more congregate supportive housing units was among the slew of priorities pushed by the City Council that the Adams administration ultimately agreed to last November. That included $137 million in capital funding to support the 15/15 initiative and the similar Justice-Involved Supportive Housing program. The $46 million in expense funding announced by the mayor Monday is separate from this, according to a City Hall spokesperson.

“We advocated for and secured greater investments in supportive housing and shifting to production of congregate sites, as well as homeowner and tenant protections that were added and restored from the mayor’s budget cuts,” Speaker Adams said in a statement. “New Yorkers will benefit from these investments, and we look forward to seeing more housing support for New Yorkers brought online to fulfill City for All commitments in the adopted city budget.”

Tackling homelessness and mental illness has emerged as a central issue in the New York City mayoral race as candidates have rolled out a number of plans to address the issue. Creating more housing and getting New Yorkers off the streets – including by expanding the state’s involuntary commitment laws for severely mentally ill people – have been big priorities for Adams over the last couple of years. Adams is now running for reelection as an independent, so voters won’t be deciding his fate until November, but this year’s budget negotiation process will be his last big opportunity to advance some of these goals through city budget investments ahead of the election. Other new housing investments slated to be announced Monday include an additional $350 million for programs to speed up repairs and renovations in New York City Housing Authority units and $7.6 million for a program to provide legal services to tenants experiencing landlord harassment.

“When we came into office, we said the days of letting people languish on our streets and on the subways were over. It was not safe, it was not humane, and it was not going to happen on our watch. That’s why we doubled the number of street outreach teams, pushed for new laws to get people the help they need, and began building thousands of new shelter beds that give people extra support,” Adams said in a statement. “With our administration’s upcoming budget, we are doubling down on these efforts – investing billions of dollars over the next 10 years in affordable housing and building thousands of new supportive housing units that will help get even more people off our subways and into stable homes.”