Temperatures in New York City have consistently dropped below freezing since late January, leaving Mayor Zohran Mamdani scrambling to get the city’s most vulnerable New Yorkers off the streets and subways, amid criticism of how his administration is reacting to the temperature plunge.
There has been a bitter cold front in the city with freezing temperatures and wind chills for the past couple of weeks, reaching as low as 3 degrees in some places. The city’s homeless population, which is disproportionately made up of Black and Latino New Yorkers, as well as people living with a mental illness or other severe health problems, has faced a serious threat as the harsh weather has made it even more dangerous to be outside.
At least 18 have died as of February 10. According to the mayor’s office, 13 of them lost their lives as a result of hypothermia, three of them died as a result of overdose, and the cause of one death is still to be determined. An additional person was found dead outdoors in the Bronx over this past weekend. (Note: It was not explicitly stated that all who died were homeless individuals.)
“I think as the mayor, I’m responsible for city actions across the five boroughs, and I think that I have to be clear about that, because I think for far too long, New Yorkers have been told to cast blame in different places, and I am the mayor,” said Mamdani when asked at a weather briefing at the city’s Emergency Management Department building in Brooklyn on February 6, 2026, if he feels responsible for the weather-related deaths.
“When a New Yorker has a critique about the way that the city has been running or the way the city has been responding, it’s my job to hear them,” he continued. “I’m lucky to be surrounded not only by an incredible team today, but frankly, every day, in ensuring that we can be the best that we can be. But there’s always more to be done.”
To answer mounting concerns for the unsheltered and unhoused, Mamdani’s team doubled efforts to expand on-the-ground outreach and communications teams, mobile warming buses and centers, and new shelter spaces. Last week, the city opened 64 new hotel shelter units in Queens, 48 new safe haven beds in the Bronx, and nearly 65 warming centers in schools and hospitals citywide.
“More lives are at stake, and the City must act with the urgency this moment demands,” said the Legal Aid Society and the Coalition for the Homeless in a joint statement about the subzero temperatures.
The outreach program engaged hundreds of homeless New Yorkers with clinical consultations and essential supplies, such as blankets, warm clothing, socks, warm meals, and water, said the city. They launched an awareness campaign in partnership with LinkNYC to appeal directly for people to come indoors or at least locate the nearest warming center. They also collaborated with 311 to reduce the amount of time it would take for a homeless individual to get help.
Mamdani said it was an “all-hands-on-deck operation,” deploying trained school nurses, Department of Homeless Services (DHS) staff, formerly homeless New Yorkers, crisis management teams, neighborhood-based violence interrupters, and business improvement districts to help street outreach teams.
“When outreach workers approach a homeless New Yorker, oftentimes what they will find is that a homeless New Yorker’s response to the offer of shelter is informed by their experiences in the past, their experiences in the shelter system, their experiences with city services,” said Mamdani. “When you conduct outreach with a peer, it has been shown to be more effective at times in making that case, because it is actually someone else who has lived through the same kind of experiences.”
Since January 19, the city has made more than 1,300 shelter placements and transported 29 homeless individuals involuntarily, according to the city.
Deborah Berkman, director of New York Legal Assistance Group (NYLAG)’s Shelter and Economic Stability Project, said she’s thrilled to hear about the placements. However, she has plenty of clients who are former military, formerly incarcerated, or people with trauma that are living outside because of systemic issues and barriers to shelter. In her experience, the Department of Social Services (DSS) doesn’t provide the majority of single adults with the privacy, safety, and bathroom accommodations they need in cramped congregate shelters.
“A lot of people live outside for very good reasons — because they’re appropriately traumatized by things that have happened to them and don’t want them to happen again,” she said. “Living outside is an expression of deep poverty, not necessarily mental illness.”
At the moment, the city is using the same “controversial” involuntary removal policies established under former Mayor Eric Adams. The policy is that clinicians, subway workers, or the NYPD can make a determination about whether a person is a danger to themselves or to others, and then transport them to a hospital. Adams had successfully pushed for expanding involuntary commitments at the state level, lowering the bar for the city to remove someone for a mental health evaluation as well. Among progressives and mental health advocates, such as Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, these laws were not popular.
With the recent cold front death toll, the conversation about homeless encampment and subway sweeps has also taken center stage again. Mamdani has resisted reinstating the practice so far. Adams believed that the sweeps would be an effective measure to keep people safe, while others slammed them as “inhumane.”
“We are against sweeps because we don’t think that they are helpful to people experiencing homelessness. They’re expensive and futile,” said Berkman. “If the goal of the sweep is to try to bring people experiencing homelessness outside inside, [then] sweeps almost never accomplish that goal and there’s a lot of published data about it.”
Others have offered that the “humane approach” to clearing a homeless encampment could be a solution. This means creating a documented list of where camps are across the city, coordinating intra-agency outreach teams supported by housing and healthcare specialists to break down a camp one person at a time with their consent; and then providing transitional care after a hospital stay.
On February 10, Mamdani agreed to make low-barrier housing placement more accessible by revoking a bed allocation rule established in 2025. Adams had created this rule to require homeless individuals to have six months of documented history of either attempting to enter congregate shelter or living on the street to get placement.