A month after New York City banned teens and young adults from sleeping through the night in drop-in centers for homeless and runaway youth, senior administration official Kathy Hochul grew frustrated.
In an email dated Feb. 8, Nina Aledort, a deputy commissioner in the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, asked a senior city official why Mayor Eric Adams’ administration erroneously said the order came from the state.
“As you know, that didn’t happen. I hope staff can be clear about that in the future,” she wrote.
In an email response, Anthony Ng, the acting chief of staff of the city’s youth and community development department, acknowledged that the policy decision was made by the city alone.
It has been “clear to us that this guidance came from DYCD, and we own it,” he wrote.
The emails, released by the state in compliance with the Freedom of Information Act, highlight widespread frustration, including from the state, at the Adams administration’s efforts to ban sleeping at the centers.
The emails also highlight the ongoing mystery surrounding the reason for the ban.
“To this day, we don’t know,” said Jamie Powlovich, executive director of the Coalition for Homeless Youth.
New York City’s five 24-7 drop-in centers, opened over the course of the past five years, are designed to serve as a haven for teens and young adults who have nowhere else to go.
While connecting young people to more permanent housing, they have also provided cots or trundle beds so that when a teen in distress turns up at 3am, or when there is a shortage of other options, they have a safe place to sleep.
The cots seem to have been no secret. The city conducts monthly inspections of the centers.
State and city officials have now sought months in vain for an explanation for the directive from the Adams administration. This also applies to the five organizations that run the night drop-in centers, one in each municipality.
A new commissioner, Keith Howard, a longtime Transportation Department official with limited subject matter experience, took over the city’s youth department last June. In a statement Monday, Amaris Cockfield, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said the ban was about safety, but declined to say what prompted the city’s policy change.
Ms. Cockfield denied that the city ever tried to blame state rules, but cited those rules as a factor in the city’s deliberations.
“Shelters are required to adhere to strict residential program safety standards set by New York State law, and these centers do not hold this type of permit, nor are they located in buildings that currently comply with New York City building codes for shelters,” said Ms Cockfield.
The state licenses shelters, which provide food, clothing, counseling, laundry and showers, and provide homeless youth with a safe place suitable for people their age. Because walk-in centers aren’t licensed as residential shelters, they’ve been in legally nebulous territory for years — a necessary concession to reality, advocates say.
In the entire city, there are only 60 shelters for young adults between the ages of 21 and 24. Fifteen of those beds are temporarily out of service and the rest are oversubscribed, Ms. Powlovich said.
On the afternoon of Jan. 13, Samantha Dawkins, a Department of Youth & Community Development official, emailed drop-in centers with the news.
“Effective immediately, providers should stop putting youth and young adults to sleep,” she wrote in a directive first reported by news site The City. “This includes removing cots or furniture designed for sleeping, and communicating to participants that the priority is to place them in a more stable living situation.”
Ms. Powlovich, whose organization represents the service providers, requested an emergency meeting for the following week. The city refused, she said. It wasn’t until the February article in The City that city officials finally agreed to meet.
Initially, city officials tried to deflect blame.
When Althea Stevens, the New York city alderman who chairs the youth welfare committee, heard about the directive, she was “seriously furious,” she said. “Young people will still show up. So is the solution for them to sleep on the floor?”
She contacted an official to find out more.
“It was like, ‘oh it’s a state mandate, this came from them’,” Ms Stevens recalled the official saying. (She declined to give the official’s name.)
One of the five sites, the Ali Forney Center in Manhattan, has publicly vowed to ignore the order.
At a city council hearing on Monday, 21-year-old Josh Bravo said he occasionally slept with Ali Forney after escaping a violent New Jersey home. Now an aspiring actor, Mr Bravo said without the opportunity to sometimes sleep with Ali Forney he “probably would have been dead in the street”.
At the hearing, city officials said the sleep ban doesn’t exclude rest, but they were still working on an “FAQ” to define the distinction between “rest” and “sleep.”