At least six of the 10 people found dead outdoors during New York City’s arctic deep freeze this week were homeless, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Wednesday, as critics urged the city to take more aggressive action to pull people off the streets.
Some advocates and elected officials said the city should be doing more to compel homeless individuals into shelters during extreme cold, though Mamdani has described forced removals as a “last resort” and has ordered his administration to halt the clearing of tent encampments across the five boroughs. The New York Post reported.
“I don’t care what your ideology is,” former city Comptroller Scott Stringer said. “When it’s 7 degrees, you get everyone in a safe place.”
Stringer, a two-time mayoral candidate, said the number of deaths should have triggered a stronger emergency response.
“If there were 10 shooting deaths, there would be a mass mobilization,” he told The Post.
Coalition for the Homeless Executive Director Dave Giffen said the death toll was nearly unprecedented.
“I’ve lived in New York City all my life and I can’t remember a time when so many people have died from a winter storm in such a short period of time, it’s absolutely tragic,” Giffen said Wednesday.
Former city officials argued that authorities should be taking a tougher approach during life-threatening conditions.
Former FDNY Commissioner Tom Van Essen said he would have ordered firefighters and EMS workers to transport homeless people to shelters “whether they like it or not.” He blamed state lawmakers for making involuntary removals more difficult.
“We have many mentally ill people who are incarcerated at Rikers,” Van Essen said. “But we allow other mentally ill people to freeze to death?”
City data shows there were 29 deaths tied to cold exposure in 2023. An average of 27 cold exposure deaths were recorded annually between 2017 and 2023, according to city figures.
The official causes of death for the 10 fatalities this year have not yet been determined by the city medical examiner.
At least one of the victims was a 90-year-old woman with dementia who was not homeless but wandered from her Brooklyn apartment before being found dead Monday morning, according to Gothamist.
The deaths were spread across four boroughs, with three each in Queens and Brooklyn and two each in Manhattan and the Bronx since Saturday, according to police.
Six of the victims were already dead when first responders arrived.
In one case, staff at St. Barnabas Hospital found a 60-year-old man unresponsive outside the medical center early Saturday morning. He was taken inside but later pronounced dead.
Another man was found naked by a construction worker in the Bronx on Monday, while a 47-year-old man was discovered slumped on a bench outside a Key Foods supermarket in Queens, law enforcement sources said.
The deaths come after Mamdani said upon taking office that his administration would end homeless encampment raids carried out under former Mayor Eric Adams.
On Tuesday, Mamdani said people would only be forced off the streets if they posed a danger to themselves or others.
“This is a last resort,” he said.
“Our first method of outreach is to communicate to homeless New Yorkers across the five boroughs as to the options that they have,” Mamdani added. “We, however, are not going to leave someone out in the cold if they’re a danger to themselves or to others.”
City Hall said outreach teams were deployed every two hours, 10 new warming centers were opened, 10 warming vans were added, and faith-based groups were asked to assist.
Giffen said the storm, which dumped more than a foot of snow in parts of the city, showed those steps were not enough.
“Is the city doing enough? I think the answer to that is very clearly no because of the fact there have been so many deaths,” he said.
