How Andrew Cuomo Made Homelessness Worse

Just 43 seconds into the video that first announced his 2025 mayoral run, Andrew Cuomo reduces the city’s current crisis into one of homeless people: “Our New York City is in trouble,” he says, “you feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person.” Only he, his campaign insists, can restore the city to sanity. He invites voters to join him in sweeping the problem—along with his own record on housing and homelessness—out of sight.

Cuomo’s mayoral hopes seem to rely on a combination of name recognition and amnesia; that voters will recall his job titles but not what he did. Across ads and interviews, he cites his former roles as Housing and Urban Development secretary and governor of New York, contrasts his years of experience with the upstart socialist Zohran Mamdani—who has been projected to beat him by one recent poll—and chides rivals, including NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, City Council Speaker Adrianne Adams, and former NYC comptroller Scott Stringer, for chasing Mamdani’s coattails. But like his pledges to restore the public-sector pensions he once cut, Cuomo’s campaign promises on housing and homelessness ignore the impact of his own past political decisions. Cuomo devised, implemented, and nationalized policies that have not only proved to fail at keeping people housed but have also actively grown the ranks of the homeless.

Cuomo’s most substantial policy impact over the course of his half-century-long career is likely his least reported: reshaping homeless services. In 1986, after managing his father’s campaign for governor, Cuomo founded and served as president of Housing Enterprise for the Less Privileged. HELP’s strategy was novel in both financing and design: It leveraged the sale of public tax credits as well as loans secured by bonds on revenue from state contracts to fund the company’s operations, and it focused on temporary over permanent housing—with mandatory behavioral treatment for residents, a strict code of conduct, and a 10 pm curfew. HELP’s answer to the social question of shelter was to discipline individuals who lacked it. As Cuomo put it, “The very term ‘homeless’ is a misnomer.… An apartment doesn’t cure a crack addiction.”

Besides his father’s career, it was that project that formed the basis of Cuomo’s influence in New York City. (He took his first wife to visit a HELP facility on their first date.) In 1991, as the city expanded its congregate shelter capacity but failed to catch up with the growing need, and as poor people’s movements escalated demands for adequate, permanent housing for all, NYC Mayor David Dinkins appointed Cuomo to lead a commission—the “Cuomo commission”—to reevaluate the city’s approach. The authors of the resulting report denied that the city had an obligation to house all of its citizens. They suggested that more was to blame for homelessness than a lack of affordable housing—namely, the deficiencies of homeless people themselves. They surveyed assessments of mental illness among shelter residents and extrapolated rates of alcohol and drug abuse from anecdotal evidence and a urinalysis test they commissioned in a single facility. The entire system, they argued, needed an overhaul to “discourage dependency.”

The commission proposed two major reversals for the city, both modeled after Cuomo’s HELP: First, privatize all city shelters; second, reorient services to route people through a disciplinary system of temporary, transitional housing. “‘Jail, jail, jail’ is just as much a false remedy as ‘housing, housing, housing,’” Cuomo later summarized. His commission offered something in the middle: a “continuum of care.” Through it, homeless people could earn access to permanent housing by demonstrating what would later be called “housing readiness,” that is, by passing fraud screenings and drug tests, meeting work requirements, attending “life management” classes, and accepting counseling and prescribed medications. Cuomo’s “continuum of care” served an ideological purpose and a financial one: to institutionalize categories of people deserving of public support and to justify austerity.

Recruited by President Clinton as assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development and then promoted to secretary, Cuomo nationalized the “continuum of care” framework. Echoing Reagan’s assistant HUD secretary, who said his administration would be “getting out of the housing business. Period,” Cuomo promised that Clinton’s administration would “get government out of the service business.” The federal government offered new contracts to private nonprofits and prioritized temporary, transitional housing in line with its disciplinary requirements. Cuomo’s influence fed back into the success of the organization he helped start. By 1994, HELP was the largest private provider of “transitional” housing for the homeless in the country. (HELP remained a family business for decades; his sister Maria Cuomo Cole served as chair of its board from 1993 to 2021.)

Cuomo’s impact on homelessness policy can still be felt across the country. He oversaw the extensive privatization of homeless services, which bloated into a cottage industry of private, nonprofit subcontractors. While he defended privatization in the name of cost-cutting, the approach has had the opposite effect: Nonprofit services often exceed their preliminary budgets, not least because they must cover the exorbitant salaries of their executive officers. (By 2011, the top salary at HELP had reached $500,000 a year.) Ceding placement decisions to private industry has segregated shelters and interim housing; facilities are often located in poorer neighborhoods and outside city limits, away from transportation and other resources unhoused people need. Finally, a lack of accountability in private accommodations has led to abominable conditions. HELP’s own properties have earned multiple code violations from heat outages, mold outbreaks, and sewage leaks.

While the original Cuomo commission report admitted that “‘transitional’ housing succeeds only when there is ‘permanent’ housing to enter,” Cuomo’s singular focus on transitional housing helped produce lasting imbalances in the national shelter system. As his mayoral rival Comptroller Brad Lander’s urgent reports often note of NYC’s ratio, a lack of permanent housing serves to trap unhoused people in transitional limbo or ultimately eject them back into the streets. As early as 1999, research on HELP’s shelter model revealed that its disciplinary methods promoted social isolation among residents that exacerbated rather than alleviated mental health struggles. While some local and federal policies have helped reverse his actions, delinking behavioral modification requirements from housing access, research continues to demonstrate that forced treatment, whether for mental health or substance abuse, not only fails to keep people housed but also drives people from resources.

Perhaps Cuomo’s gravest impact on homelessness policy has been stigmatizing homeless people and ceding ground to right-wing narratives and policy interventions. He helped turn legislators away from systemic solutions and toward individualized treatment, and turn the public’s understanding of the homelessness crisis toward law and order rather than affordability. In 1993, the conservative Manhattan Institute’s City Journal celebrated the insights of the Cuomo commission report. Now, some of the most ardent defenders of the methods Cuomo invented include Donald Trump and his supporters, who have spent a near-decade rallying around “treatment first” solutions. When Christopher Rufo, a City Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute fellow, asserted that homelessness is a “human problem—not a housing problem,” he took the words out of Cuomo’s mouth: Homelessness is a “human problem…not an economic problem,” Cuomo once said.

Individualizing the homelessness crisis has likewise protected Cuomo from accounting for his own role as an architect of the failures of our housing system more broadly. In the more familiar side of his HUD record, Cuomo helped oversee one of the main reasons the country’s housing became so wildly unaffordable: the decimation of its public housing stock. Here too, his suspicion of using public resources to solve public problems drove privatization schemes, and his paternalistic disdain for the agency of the poor inflected new admission policies, such as work requirements, drug testing, and fraud screening, as well as bans on residents with criminal records. Instead of public housing, Cuomo pressed for privately owned, publicly subsidized housing—a strategy that failed to meet the needs of the most vulnerable tenants—as well as “empowerment zones” that gave tax breaks and public land to real estate speculators.