City investigation finds faked stats and bad communication at homeless agency

NEW YORK — Unreported right-to-shelter violations, poor record keeping and outright manipulation of statistics within the New York City Department of Homeless Services has been taking place under Mayor Eric Adams and his predecessor Bill de Blasio, the city’s Department of Investigation charges in a report Tuesday.

Investigators found Adams’ administration failed to provide beds overnight for at least 11 homeless families in the summer of 2022, violating a longstanding city rule ensuring people seeking shelter are given a place to sleep.

City officials had previously confirmed just five of the 11 violations, according to the report. And there may have been even more right-to-shelter violations that couldn’t be confirmed because of the department's poor record keeping and casual approach to the violations, the 46-page report found.

The agency’s former commissioner, Gary Jenkins, “exacerbated” the issue with the “lack of full transparency in his communications” about the violations, the report reads.

Additionally, DOI found a top homeless services official artificially lowered a publicly reported statistic in order to look better for her bosses, including de Blasio. From 2017 until 2022, DHS Administrator Joslyn Carter and her subordinates manipulated the “Monthly Eligibility Rate” which measures the percentage of homeless families seeking shelter who are deemed eligible for services.

The report couldn’t determine the specific impacts, but noted: “it logically would have subjected some eligible families to, at a minimum, slightly longer wait times to qualify for housing vouchers — potentially prolonging by at least some small amount of time the families’ stays in shelters and delaying their moves into more stable housing.”

Carter still serves as DHS administrator — one of the top positions in the city’s sprawling social services bureaucracy — though the report found she stopped manipulating the metric soon after Adams took office, since his administration was “not focused” on the number.

“As DHS’s family shelter population is now at record highs, (the Department of Social Services) must maintain accurate information about the circumstances at (the homeless family intake center),” the report reads. “Any information provided to the public about these matters also must be accurate.”

The findings mark a rare instance in which DOI, a semi-independent watchdog agency tasked with rooting out corruption, has reported on wrongdoing in the Adams’ administration since it took office two years ago. DOI commissioners are appointed by mayors and approved by the City Council, making them inherently beholden to an extent to the executives they are charged with probing. Some aim to be aggressive anyway — like Mark Peters, whom de Blasio famously fired, citing an abuse of power.

DHS spokesperson Neha Sharma defended Carter’s long tenure and suggested she would not face discipline.

“We respect the findings of this investigation and are fully committed to taking any steps needed to further strengthen accountability mechanisms at the agency,” Sharma's statement read. “But this one instance is not a reflection of the hard work of a civil servant who has demonstrated unwavering commitment to supporting vulnerable communities and has helped countless New Yorkers stabilize their lives.”

City Hall spokesperson Kayla Mamelak provided a lengthy statement defending the administration's response to the influx of migrants coming to the city — more than 168,000 to date.

“The Department of Investigation agreed with precisely what we have been saying all along — there was never any wrongdoing by Mayor Adams nor anyone at City Hall as we began to experience this influx almost two years ago,” the spokesperson said.

Jenkins, who was also found to have downplayed and delayed reporting the right-to-shelter violations in the report, announced plans to resign from city service last February before joining Oaktree Solutions, the consulting firm owned by Adams’ former chief of staff Frank Carone.

Jenkins offered a statement saying the report completely exonerated him, when it did not.

“After an extensive investigation, I’m pleased to be cleared of any wrongdoing. I communicated transparently to City Hall and proudly stand by my tenure, especially given the unprecedented and unpredictable nature of the migrant crisis,” Jenkins said.

DOI Commissioner Jocelyn Strauber actually wrote something to the contrary in a press release introducing the findings: “The investigation also exposed a lack of full transparency by former DSS Commissioner Gary Jenkins in his initial discussions with City Hall.”

This report comes a year and half after the first reports of the Adams administration’s struggles to provide shelter for homeless families amid the city’s increase in migrants seeking asylum.

Right to shelter violations used to be incredibly rare, but became so common among the recent influx of migrants that Adams moved to suspend some related rules last May as he struggled to provide adequate temporary housing.

Nearly a year earlier, on July 21, 2022, Adams held a press conference to admit that his administration had violated the so-called 10-to-4 Rule requiring families seeking shelter before 10 p.m. be provided a bed by 4 a.m.

But that only came after a day when Jenkins, who led homeless services, failed to alert the Legal Aid Society to the violations for more than 24 hours. Legal Aid is a party to the consent decree establishing the legal right to shelter, and the move was “contrary to DHS’s well-established practice to promptly notify the Legal Aid Society of significant issues related to the shelter system,” Tuesday's DOI report reads. That “created the impression that the agency was not being transparent about an issue of significant public interest.”

Jenkins did text Deputy Mayor for Health & Human Services Anne Williams-Isom quickly after being alerted of families sleeping at the city’s homeless intake center. But the investigation found he failed to properly communicate the gravity of the issue to City Hall. Jenkins’ then-spokesperson also alerted City Hall staff that same morning, with an apparent concern that Jenkins was not taking the issue seriously.

The spokesperson Julia Savel was fired by Jenkins just weeks later, and the press coverage of this apparent act of retaliation was what initiated DOI’s investigation. DOI was unable to conclude whether Savel’s firing was due to her elevating the right to shelter violations.