New York
What Permanent Supportive Housing Can, and Can’t, Do for New Yorkers
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.
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The latest Metro news
Corruption charges against Adams are dismissed
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.
New York
Essential New York City Movies Picked by Ira Sachs and Blondie’s Debbie Harry and Chris Stein
Film
‘Make Way for Tomorrow’ (1937), directed by Leo McCarey
The log line: After the bank forecloses on their home, an elderly couple must separate, each living with a different one of their adult children.
The pitch: “It’s a film that Orson Welles famously said ‘would make a stone cry,’” says Sachs, 60, about McCarey’s movie, singling out a long sequence at the end that depicts “a date through certain lobbies and bars of New York City that offers a snapshot of Midtown in the ’30s.”
‘The World of Henry Orient’ (1964), directed by George Roy Hill
The log line: A wily 14-year-old girl and her best friend follow a ridiculous concert pianist, on whom they have a crush, around the city.
The pitch: Hill’s 1960s romp inspired Sachs’s film “Little Men” (2016), which is about boys around the same age as these protagonists. “It’s an extraordinarily sweet film that also seems, to me, very honest,” he says.
‘Coming Apart’ (1969), directed by Milton Moses Ginsberg
The log line: Rip Torn plays an obsessive psychiatrist who secretly films all the women passing through his home office, inadvertently capturing his own mental breakdown.
The pitch: Shot in one room with a fixed camera, Ginsberg’s film “really feels of a time,” says Sachs. It’s also “very sexual and very free,” reminding him of what’s possible when it comes to making movies.
‘Deadly Hero’ (1975), directed by Ivan Nagy
The log line: A disturbed, racist cop saves a cellist from a crook, only to become her tormentor.
The pitch: Harry, 80, and Stein, 76, were extras in Nagy’s film, which stars Don Murray, Diahn Williams and James Earl Jones as the cop, the cellist and the crook, respectively. The pair call the movie “[expletive] weird,” but also say that their day rate — $300 — “was the most money we’d ever made on anything” up to that point.
‘News From Home’ (1976), directed by Chantal Akerman
The log line: An experimental documentary by Akerman, a Belgian filmmaker who moved to New York in her early 20s, the film features long takes of the city and voice-over in which the director reads letters from her mother.
The pitch: “I’m intrigued by how beauty contains sadness in the city,” says Sachs. Not only is her film a “beautiful record of the city” but it captures “what it is to be alone here, to have left some sort of community and, in particular for Chantal, separated from her mother.”
‘Wolfen’ (1981), directed by Michael Wadleigh
The log line: Albert Finney stars as a former N.Y.P.D. detective who returns to the job to solve a violent and bizarre string of murders.
The pitch: Wadleigh’s film is not only a vehicle for Finney, says Stein, it also “has a lot of footage from the South Bronx when it was still completely destroyed” by widespread arson in the 1970s.
‘Losing Ground’ (1982), directed by Kathleen Collins
The log line: Collins’s film — the first feature-length drama for a major studio directed by an African American woman — observes a rocky relationship between a college professor and her painter husband.
The pitch: Sachs calls “Losing Ground” “a revelation.” The characters are “so human and fascinating and extremely modern,” he says, adding that he loves a movie that “exists in some very complete version of the local.”
‘After Hours’ (1985), directed by Martin Scorsese
The log line: In Scorsese’s black comedy, an office worker (Griffin Dunne) has a surreal and bizarre evening of misadventure while trying to get back uptown from a woman’s apartment in SoHo.
The pitch: Harry and Stein recommend this zany tale and borderline “nightmare” for the way it captures a bygone era of New York. “It’s this great image of [Lower Manhattan] when it was still raw, you know, Wild West territory,” Stein says.
‘Downtown 81’ (shot in 1980-81, released in 2000), directed by Edo Bertoglio
The log line: Bertoglio’s film is a striking portrait of a young artist who needs to raise money so he can return to the apartment from which he’s been evicted.
The pitch: Jean-Michel Basquiat stars as the artist in this snapshot of life in New York during the ’80s. Despite all the drama surrounding it — postproduction wasn’t completed until 20 years after filming, and for many years the movie was considered lost — the film is notable, says Stein, because “it’s got all the characters and all our buddies in it.”
These interviews have been edited and condensed.
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Theater
Quincy Tyler Bernstine
A master of active stillness, the 52-year-old Bernstine (imposing in the 2024 revival of John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt,” above) has that great actorly gift of making thought visible. A natural leader onstage, she compels audiences to follow her.
Victoria Clark
One of the theater’s best singing actors, with Tonys for Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas’s “The Light in the Piazza” (2005) and David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori’s “Kimberly Akimbo” (above, 2022), Clark, 66, performs not on top of the notes but through them, delivering complicated characterization and gorgeous sound in each breath.
Susannah Flood
Flood, 43, is a true expert at confusion, a good thing because she often plays characters like the twisted-in-knots Lizzie in Bess Wohl’s “Liberation” (above, 2025). What makes that confusion thrilling is how she grounds it not in a lack of information or purpose but, just like real life, in an excess of both.
Jonathan Groff
The rare musical theater man with the unstoppable drive of a diva, Groff, 41, sweats charisma, as audience members in ringside seats at Warren Leight and Isaac Oliver’s Broadway musical “Just in Time” (above, 2025) recently discovered. Giving you everything, he makes you want more.
William Jackson Harper
Unmoored characters are often unsympathetic. But whether playing a confused doctor in the 2024 revival of Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” or a delusional bookstore clerk in Eboni Booth’s “Primary Trust” (above, 2023), Harper, 46, makes vulnerability look easy, and hurt hard.
Joshua Henry
There are singers who blow the roof off theaters, but the 41-year-old Henry’s voice is so huge and deeply connected to universal feelings that he seems to be singing inside you. Currently starring in the Broadway revival of “Ragtime” (above, by Lynn Ahrens, Stephen Flaherty and Terrence McNally), he blows the roof off your head.
Mia Katigbak
Superb and acidic in almost any role — in distress (Annie Baker’s 2023 “Infinite Life,” above) or in command (2024’s “Uncle Vanya”) — Katigbak, 71, finds the sweet spot in even the sourest truths of the human condition.
Judy Kuhn
With detailed intelligence and specific intention informing everything she sings, Kuhn, 67, is (among other things) a Stephen Sondheim specialist — her take on Fosca in “Passion” (above, 2012) was almost literally wrenching. It requires intellectual stamina to keep up with the master word for word.
Laurie Metcalf
The fierce, sharp persona you may know from her years on “Roseanne” (1988-97) is about a tenth of the blistering commitment Metcalf, 70, offers onstage in works like Samuel D. Hunter’s “Little Bear Ridge Road” (above, 2025). She goes there, no matter the destination.
Deirdre O’Connell
For 40 years an Off Broadway treasure, O’Connell, 72, handles the most daring, out-there material — including, recently, a 12-minute monologue of cataclysmic gibberish in Caryl Churchill’s “Kill” (above, 2025) — as if it were as ordinary as barroom gossip.
Conrad Ricamora
Revealing the Buddy Holly in Benigno Aquino Jr. (in the 2023 Broadway production of David Byrne and Fatboy Slim’s “Here Lies Love”) or the queer wolf in Abraham Lincoln (in Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” above, last year), Ricamora, 47, is uniquely capable of great dignity and great silliness — and, wonderfully, both together.
Andrew Scott
It’s a tough competition, but Scott, 49, may have the thinnest skin of any actor. Whether he’s onstage (playing all the characters in Simon Stephens’s Off Broadway “Vanya,” above, in 2025) or on film, every emotion — especially rue — reads right through his translucence.
Michael Patrick Thornton
Some actors are hedgehogs, projecting one idea blazingly. Thornton, 47, is a fox, carefully hoarding ideas and motivations. Keeping you guessing as Jessica Chastain’s benefactor in the 2023 revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” or as a pathetic lackey in last year’s production of Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot” (above, center), he holds you in his thrall.
More in Theater
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How can people possibly afford to live in one of the most expensive cities on the planet? It’s a question New Yorkers hear a lot, often delivered with a mix of awe, pity and confusion.
We surveyed hundreds of New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save. We found that many people — rich, poor or somewhere in between — live life as a series of small calculations that add up to one big question: What makes living in New York worth it?
Here’s one way to make New York more affordable: triple your income. After moving from Baton Rouge, La., in 2016 to attend graduate school, Daniel Babin lived mostly on red beans and rice or homemade “slop pots,” renting rooms in what he called a “cult house” and a building on a block his girlfriend was afraid to visit.
Then, in January, he got a job as a geologist with a mineral exploration company, with a salary of $200,000, plus a $15,000 signing bonus. A new city suddenly opened up to him. “I can take a woman out on a $300 dinner date and not look at the check and not feel bad about it,” he said. He also now has health insurance.
Mr. Babin, 32, a marine geologist who also leads an acoustic string band, now navigates two economic worlds, one shaped to his postdoctoral income of $70,000 a year — when his idea of a date was a walk in Central Park — and the other reflecting his new income. In this world, he is shopping for a vintage Martin Dreadnought guitar, for which he will gladly drop $4,000.
Finding a New Base Line
On a recent morning at Mr. Babin’s home in Bushwick, Brooklyn, where he shares a 6,800-square-foot cohousing space with 17 roommates, he was still figuring out how to manage this split.
“I’m feeling less inclined to just let it rip than I was a few months ago,” he said of his spending habits. He socks away $1,500 from each paycheck, and has not moved to replace his 2003 Toyota Corolla, an “absolute dump” given to him by his father. “Hopefully, I’m returning a little bit to some kind of base-line lifestyle that I’ve established for myself over the last five years,” he continued. “Because the fear is lifestyle inflation. You don’t want to just make more money to spend more money. That’s not the point, right?”
Lightning Lofts, the cohousing space where Mr. Babin has lived since January 2024, bills itself as part of a “social wellness movement” and seeks to continue the ethos of Burning Man, the annual communal art and cultural festival in the Nevada desert.
For a room with an elevated loft bed and use of common areas, Mr. Babin pays $1,400 a month in rent, plus another $250 for utilities and weekly housecleaning.
He was first drawn to the organization through its events, including open mic “salons” where he played music or read from his science fiction writings. These were free or very cheap nights out, unpredictable and fascinating.
“You would see dance and tonal singing, and some dude wrote an algorithm that can auto-generate A.I. video based on what you’re saying — beautiful storytelling,” he said.
“So I just showed up every month, basically, until they let me live here.”
The room was a good deal. He had looked at a nearby building where the rent was $1,900 for a room in a basement apartment that flooded once a month. “Ridiculous,” he said.
But beyond its financial appeal, Mr. Babin liked the loft’s social life. “I used to be chronically lonely, and I just don’t feel lonely anymore,” he said. “Which is fantastic in a crazy place like New York. It’s so alive and it’s so isolating at the same time.”
Splurging on Ski Trips
Before Mr. Babin got his new job, he used to go to restaurants with friends and not eat, trying to save up $35 for a “burner” party — in the spirit of Burning Man — or Ecstatic Dance, a recurring substance-free dance party. He loved to ski but could not afford a hotel, so he would carry his old skis and beat-up boots to southern Vermont and back on the same day.
“Going on a hike is a pretty cheap hobby,” he said, recalling his money-saving measures. “Living without health insurance is a good one.”
He still appreciates a good hike, he said. But on a recent ski trip, he splurged on new $700 boots and another $300 worth of gear. “I’m like, this is something I’ve wanted for 10 years, so I deserve it,” he said.
He bought a $600 drone to take pictures for his social media accounts, and then promptly crashed it into the Caribbean (he’s now replacing the rotors in hopes of returning it to health).
He cut out the red beans and rice, he said, but his usual meal is still a modest $13 sandwich from the nearby bodega or $10 for pizza. “If I’m getting takeout and it’s less than $17, I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said.
A Future After Cohousing
A big change is that dating is much more comfortable now, and he feels more attractive as a marriage prospect. “It turns out that a lot more people pay attention to you if you offer them dinner instead of a walk in the park,” he said.
He is now thinking of leaving the cohousing space — not just because he can afford to, but because his work has kept him from joining house events, like the regular potluck dinners. “I sometimes feel like a bad roommate, because part of being here is participating,” he said. “I feel like there might be someone who would enjoy the community aspect more than I’m capable of contributing right now.”
He sounds almost wistful in discussing his former economizing. If it weren’t for the dating issue, he said, he would not need the higher income or lifestyle upgrades. “I never really felt like I was compromising on what I wanted to do,” he said.
He paused. “It’s just that what I was comfortable with has changed a little bit.”
We are talking to New Yorkers about how they spend, splurge and save.
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