Crown Heights site adds 46 beds to city program housing homeless psychiatric patients

A second Bridge to Home site, with room for 46 residents, opens Tuesday in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, and the Mamdani administration will announce two more locations. The program was started by the city’s public hospital system. Under it, people who are homeless and live with serious mental illness are not discharged from the hospital to a shelter or the street. Instead they get a place to live with support.

How the Bridge to Home program works

The first site opened last year inside a repurposed Midtown hotel. People referred there when they leave the hospital get their own room with a TV, meals, clothing and help with housing, plus clinical care at any hour. Their psychiatrist has an office downstairs. Staff aim to have each person ready for an apartment within 12 months, and 18 residents have already moved into permanent homes.

The 42 people living at the Midtown site have no curfew. Each room comes with a private bathroom, a closet and a microwave. Because nurses and psychiatrists work in the building, residents can get checkups, collect prescriptions and receive injectable medication without leaving. The hospital system says the numbers so far are encouraging. Roughly 65% of residents are keeping up with their monthly injectable medication. Housing applications are finished for 70% of them, and about 80% come to clinical appointments every week.

“We’re that intervening layer that didn’t exist before,” said Dr. Ted Long, who serves as a chief medical officer for the hospital system.

Breaking the cycle between hospitals, shelters and the street

Before he became the program’s medical director and on-site psychiatrist, Chris Clayton treated patients in Bellevue’s inpatient psychiatric unit. He said homeless patients there were stabilized and started on medication, but at discharge many got little more than a slip of paper pointing them to the shelter system’s intake site. “Maybe they made it there, maybe they didn’t,” he said.

Melissa Shoupe, a licensed clinical social worker who directs the site, said what matters is having staff nearby, since they can walk to a resident’s door and give a reminder about an appointment. Residents often forget, she said, and many would not use their last $3 on an OMNY fare to get to a doctor.

Mark Thomas Jr., 30, spent 11 months in the program and now has his own apartment in the Bronx. He said he arrived after a hospital stay, homeless and unable to walk. Today he has a home and a job and is working toward a career helping other people.

The expansion comes after the number of people living on the city’s streets hit a record last year, while state and local lawmakers press for better support for homeless New Yorkers in crisis.