Good morning, my name is Jody Rudin, and I am the president and CEO of the Institute for Community Living (ICL), a large behavioral health and housing organization that serves over 10,000 people annually and provides housing for 4,000 people each night across all five boroughs.
Thank you, Speaker Menin, Chairs Hudson and Feliz, and Committee members, for your leadership in calling this hearing.
The Administration deserves credit for its rapid mobilization of warming centers, buses, and kiosks, and for opening emergency beds during this recent cold weather emergency. The effort to evolve the plan and resolve issues has been noteworthy. And the homeless outreach providers deserve our gratitude for their 24/7 life-saving work. My colleagues at ICL and I stand ready to support this work however we can.
However, we must also understand that for our neighbors living on the streets, “emergency” is not a seasonal event; it is their daily reality. Unhoused New Yorkers face an ongoing public health crisis. Individuals living on the streets experience mortality rates 3.5 times higher than the general population due to the compounding impact of weather emergencies (including hot weather), deterioration of health, and violence.
We cannot “emergency” our way out of a structural crisis. We need a permanent, non-seasonal commitment to the following:
Housing Prioritization, “low-threshold” beds (such as safe havens, stabilization, and medical respite beds), more IMT slots, and a commitment to fund the STEPS program, which works with the highest acuity clients across the city who have often been on the streets for decades and have been failed by other systems. Programs like STEPS, an innovative pilot program operated by ICL that steps down those with the most acute needs from an intensive mobile treatment program to less intensive services, have demonstrated that sustained, intensive engagement can successfully connect even the most chronically unhoused individuals to housing and care. The city council worked with then-Mayor Adams to allocate $15M in the FY2026 budget. These funds have not been procured and, if allocated, could save lives.
We also need an accountable governance structure that reflects and streamlines the complexity and cross-agency nature of this work.
And we need to return to a humane encampment policy.
When I was assistant commissioner at DHS, we reduced street homelessness by 40%.
Here’s how: outreach teams created a by-name list of people living on the streets, identified what each individual wanted, and we created those options, including innovating and scaling safe havens, stabilization beds, and other low-threshold models. We prioritized people for housing based on their mortality risk and length of homelessness.
And we paired this person-centered approach with a commitment to ending encampments, which are not humane and rob people of their dignity.
You can read more about this approach in my recent column in Vital City here.
Thank you for the opportunity to testify.
