Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll look at an apartment complex in the Bronx where about 60 formerly homeless people live in what’s called permanent supportive housing. We’ll also get details on a federal judge’s decision to drop corruption charges against Mayor Eric Adams.

An apartment complex in the Bronx, called the Lenniger Residences, is home to about 60 formerly homeless people with mental illness. My colleague Andy Newman, who covers social services for the Metro desk, and the photographer Thea Traff spent more than a year talking with residents and workers at the Lenniger. It is owned by a nonprofit, the Center for Urban Community Services, and follows a model called permanent supportive housing. I talked with Andy about what life there is like.

From what you saw, how well does permanent supportive housing work? Is its one-stop approach a panacea?

The main goal of permanent supportive housing is to keep people who have been chronically homeless out of homelessness, and from what we saw at the Lenniger, it does a great job of that.

Over the last four years at the Lenniger, 97 percent of the supportive housing residents — all battling mental illness and most struggling with substance abuse — have either remained there or moved to other stable housing. About half the people who moved in when the Lenniger opened in 2011 are still living there.

But just because someone is housed doesn’t mean they’re doing great.

Supportive housing is designed to make it hard to “fail out.” It does that by, among other things, not requiring people to be sober or take their psychiatric medication. So there is a lot of drug use and a fair amount of disorder. The Lenniger generated more than 200 calls to 9-1-1 last year.

Some tenants told us that being around so much drug use made it harder for them to work on getting sober. Some told us that they felt like they were “stuck” there.

There aren’t many rules at the Lenniger. What happens when someone breaks a rule? Does the Lenniger evict people when they don’t pay the rent?

One rule the Lenniger does have is that you’re supposed to check in with your case manager twice a month. That’s a person who offers counseling, helps you set goals, helps you manage your finances, helps you navigate benefits bureaucracies and connects you to medical and psychiatric providers and drug programs.

But if you don’t meet with your case manager, there are no real consequences. The program director said they “work around client ambivalence.”

People who do things like act out and cause damage seldom face consequences, either. A Lenniger official told us that it’s hard to get the police to take calls from the Lenniger seriously because there are so many of them. If someone is causing problems, the Lenniger tries to counsel the person back toward stability, though occasionally people who are in major enough crisis will be sent to a hospital psychiatric ward.

What about paying rent?

The amount you’re supposed to pay is set at 30 percent of your income, which is typically a disability check.

About 20 percent of the supportive housing tenants at the Lenniger are at least three months behind on the rent, but again, the Lenniger doesn’t want to see people out on the street. So they haven’t evicted anyone since 2017.

You met one woman who had been addicted to heroin and crack for decades and was H.I.V. positive. For a long time she wouldn’t go to the hospital, although she finally did go to a drug rehab. Does the Lenniger force anyone to go for treatment when they clearly need it?

No.

The woman you’re talking about spent a month in an inpatient program last summer. A couple of weeks after she returned to the Lenniger, another tenant went to check on her. She was dead on the floor in her apartment.

Cases like hers must be difficult for the staff. Is the Lenniger a hard place to work? What’s the turnover among staff members?

The Lenniger is certainly a challenging place to work. Staff members spoke of the frustration they feel when a client disengages.

But working there is rewarding, too. As one case manager, Marcos Gonzalez, told us, “You stay in this because you want to make an impact in people’s lives, and you want to assist people that need assistance. And that’s the reward that you get. Sometimes you go home and cry, or you go chug a beer, however you handle it. And then some days you go home really excited, and you want to help somebody else in life, or you want to tell somebody, “Hey, I did this for this person.”

The concept of permanent supportive housing originated in New York. How many people are in permanent supportive housing now? How many more could be, if there were enough places like the Lenniger?

There are about 45,000 people in permanent supportive housing in New York City and about 70,000 statewide.

The city and state are always in the process of increasing the supply of permanent supportive housing, but there are never enough spots for the number of people who qualify. In the fiscal year that ended last June, about 9,600 people in New York City were found eligible to move into supportive housing. But only 2,400 found an apartment.

Weather

Expect a cloudy day with the possibility of light showers in the morning, fog, and temperatures rising to the high 60s. In the evening, mostly cloudy with a chance of showers and a low around 52 degrees.

ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING

In effect until April 13 (Passover).

The latest Metro news

The end of the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams indicated that politics now takes precedence at the Justice Department, which is using its power over prosecutions to further President Trump’s agenda.

The mayor, a Democrat, promptly doubled down on the mutually beneficial relationship he had struck with the administration, urging New Yorkers to read a book by the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel.

The Justice Department had sought the dismissal, saying the charges against Adams were keeping him from cooperating with Trump’s crackdown on migrants. Adams had curried favor with Trump for months, flying to Florida for a meeting with Trump, attending the president’s inauguration and giving immigration agents access to the Rikers Island jail complex.

The judge, Dale Ho of Federal District Court in Manhattan, did not give the Justice Department everything it asked for. He ruled out letting the government retain the option of reinstating the case.

“Everything here smacks of a bargain: dismissal of the indictment in exchange for immigration policy concessions,” the judge wrote in a 78-page decision. He suggested that the government’s other arguments, that the charges were filed too close to the next mayoral election and that the case had created “appearances of impropriety,” were misleading and insincere.

Judge Ho discounted the Justice Department’s claims that the case had been brought for political reasons by federal prosecutors in Manhattan. “There is no evidence — zero — that they had any improper motives,” he wrote.

After Judge Ho issued the dismissal, Adams reiterated that the case “should have never been brought, and I did nothing wrong.” Adams also said he would win his campaign for re-election, even though he is facing a crowded field of challengers and his fund-raising has lagged.

METROPOLITAN diary

Neighborhood Grocery

Dear Diary:

It was 1987. I had just moved to New York from Texas. I loved going to small neighborhood grocery stores in the city. They were so different from the huge suburban ones I was used to.