As Lethal Cold Hits, Mamdani Opens Schools as Warming Centers and Taps Peer Outreach Teams

As New York staggers through a deadly Arctic spell, a patchwork of emergency responses throws perennial questions about homelessness, public health, and city readiness into sharp relief.

Last winter, 671 unhoused New Yorkers succumbed to the cold—this year, the toll may rise, outpacing even the previous record. As forecasts predicted “real-feel” temperatures dropping to a perilous minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit over the weekend, the administration of Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced a flurry of emergency measures: ten public schools pressed into service as warming centers; street-outreach efforts bolstered by school nurses and peer workers with lived homeless experience; and the expansion of shelter and safe haven hotel rooms for those wary of congregate settings.

The city’s “code blue” alert, in place since January 19th, already loosened some of the daunting rules that often keep the most vulnerable shivering outdoors. Under this declaration, shelters must admit anyone seeking reprieve, and outreach teams are empowered to move people involuntarily when temperatures alone render the streets immediately life-threatening—a threshold now reached. For many, this comes too late: at least 17 people have died outside during this Arctic stretch, with 13 succumbing to hypothermia, three to overdoses, and one cause still undetermined.

Mamdani, at a pointed Friday briefing, described the city’s posture as “all hands on deck.” In addition to school nurses, the city is tapping violence interrupters from its crisis management system and deploying staff from the Association of Community Employment Programs for the Homeless. Two new CUNY facilities and partnerships with Northwell Health are temporarily swelling the count to 62 warming centers. Newly conspicuous signage and LinkNYC kiosks—now equipped for one-touch 311 access—promise to make these havens easier to locate, even as city services trim wait times for emergency shelter prompts to under a minute.

The sudden escalation in interventions reflects both urgency and chronicity: over the past two weeks, outreach teams have placed more than 1,250 people into indoor shelter—twice the typical rate—while another 27 were transported against their will for their own safety. The city is also experimenting with inviting formerly homeless New Yorkers to join outreach teams, betting that “peers” may succeed with those most distrustful of officialdom.

At street level, these efforts are critical. The death toll, however, underlines the seemingly Sisyphean nature of municipal responses to urban homelessness. Each “code blue” episode spurs a frantic expansion of aid, yet the underlying numbers remain stubborn. The Department of Homeless Services counted over 68,000 people sleeping in city shelters each night in January; thousands more avoid official counts, wary of surveillance, violence, or contagion within communal settings. The climate’s mood swings—aided by chaotic, increasingly volatile weather patterns—render each wave of extreme cold ever more lethal and unpredictable.

Second-order effects ripple throughout the city. Teachers and nurses, already stretched, now duel exhaustion as their school buildings morph into overnight refuges. Public health, meanwhile, cannot afford tunnel vision: of the cold-related deaths, several stemmed from drug overdoses, underscoring the interplay of opioid use, precarity, and exposure. Two overdose prevention centers will now run round-the-clock alongside warmth-seeking operations—perhaps a prudent, if decidedly unsentimental, marriage of services.

The economics of such emergencies are non-trivial. Each new hotel room repurposed as a safe haven brings added costs to the city (which spends around $5,000 per shelter bed, per month), even as budgets buckle under inflation and the protracted strain of the asylum-seeker crisis. Partnerships with health systems and employment agencies are the sort of public-private improvisations that New York excels at in extremis—but they also suggest limits to the city’s own infrastructure.

A familiar urban paradox

Other metropolises, from Chicago to Toronto, have confronted the same freeze with parallel recourses: pop-up warming centers, emergency shelter expansions, and peer navigation pilots. Yet New York’s scale is unique, and so is its politics. Most cold-weather cities struggle to entice their hardest-to-reach homeless indoors; the city’s perennial debate over involuntary removal has grown only more heated under Mamdani—a mayor who styles himself both as a pragmatic progressive and an inheritor of the city’s tradition of robust intervention.

The broader American context is unlikely to offer much solace. Federal homelessness funding remains tepid, while Republican-leaning states eye policies that are more punitive than preventative. New York remains an outlier, both in its welfarist ambitions and in the sheer magnitude of its urban rough sleeping population. Globally, only a handful of cities—in Canada, Germany, or Scandinavia—have demonstrated sustained progress in moving large numbers off the streets in winter, typically via far more expansive housing-first policies.

We reckon the current “all hands” response, though necessary, exposes chronic weaknesses as much as strengths. Deploying nurses to the streets and conscripting public buildings as warming centers may stave off another night’s death, but these improvisations do little to alter the longer arc of urban precariousness. The decision to involve peer outreach agents—people with lived street experience—holds promise; research from Finland (one of the few nations to virtually end rough sleeping) suggests such approaches carry more credibility among the chronically unsheltered. Still, these are incremental shifts.

The city’s willingness to act swiftly—and its candour about the limitations of its response—bodes somewhat well; Mamdani’s admission that responsibility ultimately rests at City Hall is refreshingly frank. Yet we remain sceptical that piecemeal expansions of capacity and outreach will meaningfully reduce the perennial toll of winter on the city’s margins. Without sustained investments in supportive housing and a redesign of shelter environments to be both safe and appealing, each cold snap will bring another makeshift mobilisation—and another reckoning with preventable tragedy.

Even in “code blue”, New York finds itself caught between ambitious improvisation and stubborn structural gaps. For now, the city’s patchwork response hints at both resilience and resignation—a motif, perhaps, for urban governance in an age of extreme weather and rising inequality. ■