New York’s Shelters Were Packed. Now They Are Bursting at the Seams.

“There’s not a day I go to bed and where I’m not like ‘Do we have enough for tonight?’” said Anne Williams-Isom, the deputy mayor for health and human services.

Where are those 100,000 people living? What does that life look like?

Renee Culp, 50, has stayed in shelters for a decade. “It’s been hell,” she said. “You have no resources.” Try finding a job with no computer to look for one, she said.

A more recent arrival is Elliot Ramirez, 36, a Colombian carpenter who left his family and traveled through Nicaragua and Mexico to swim the Rio Grande to Texas. He said a “foundation” gave him a free plane ticket and for two months he has stayed at the Bedford-Atlantic Armory shelter in Brooklyn.

It’s been a whirlwind. The food is OK. The place is uncomfortably crowded, though so many inside speak Spanish that it reminds him of home. Jobs are hard to find without a work visa, so he can’t use the skills he brought with him.

“It’s more complicated in New York,” he said.

Roger Davis, 65, entered a shelter in the Bronx after an outreach worker found him sleeping in a subway car. He lived indoors for a year until it got too crowded. Nobody seemed to follow the rules anymore, smoking anywhere they pleased. The bathrooms became filthy, and staff members, exhausted, scolded anyone in front of them.

Mr. Davis returned to the streets. Sometimes he sleeps in the subways, sometimes on the sidewalks, in shanties made from shipping pallets.

“It’s easier that way,” he said.

Ezekiel Lee, 57, at a shelter on 12th Street in Brooklyn, said there is more waste in the system — razors used once and thrown away, leading to a shortage.