NYC NOW - Inside One of New York City’s Most Dangerous Women’s Shelters

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

New York City is legally required to provide shelter to anyone who needs it. But a new WNYC and Gothamist investigation finds that the Tillary Street Women’s Shelter in Downtown Brooklyn has become a place where violence, overdoses and chaos are part of daily life. WNYC and Gothamist editor Andrew Giambrone joins us to discuss months of reporting that uncovered more than 2,000 calls to 911 in a single year, hundreds of fights, and growing concerns from residents who say they did not feel safe inside one of the city’s largest shelters for women with mental illness and addiction.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. I saw a lot. Female fighting and getting their ears bitten off and stuff like that, you know, that's trauma. And people not getting the care that they need. Residents at the Tilleries Street Women's Shelter have reported unsafe conditions for years. Some say it's so bad that they'd rather sleep on the streets. On today's episode, we dig into a WNYC and Gothamist investigation that finds that the shelter has become a place where violence and chaos are part of daily life.

But before we get into that, here's what's happening across the five boroughs. New York City has won a $31 million judgment against the owners of two troubled Bronx apartment buildings. The city says it's the largest civil penalty in the history of the city's housing department. Mayor Zoram Mundani says the owners of Robert Fulton Terrace and Fordham Towers in the Bronx have racked up more than a thousand housing violations. Tenants described rat infestations, broken elevators that trapped them in 17-story towers. People went to sleep hungry because a trip to the grocery store to buy a carton of eggs or a gallon of milk required walking up and down hundreds of stairs. The buildings are already informed. Foreclosure, officials say the judgment will give the city significant leverage over who buys them next.

Attorneys for the building owners did not immediately comment. Republicans have a warning for New York State lawmakers. If you pass new laws protecting immigrants, there will be consequences. Borders are Tom Holman says he'll send more immigration agents to New York if Democrats in Albany put new restrictions on ice. Governor Kathy Hokel and lawmakers say they're close to a deal that would ban formal agreements that allow cooperation between and local police. Holman's warning came at a border security conference in Arizona. Another Republican, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakman,

says he'll sue to maintain immigration enforcement in his county. It's insane. It's just absolutely insane. People talk about ICE as if they're bad people. We've worked very, very well together with him. Hockel says Trump has promised not to surge ICE agents to New York. The governor says a budget deal is getting close. NYC Pride, the group behind the New York City Pride March, has announced the full list of its grand marshals.

Four people will lead the parade next month. They include actress Dominique Jackson, best known for her role on the show Pose, drag queen peppermint, comedian Bowen, and Bernie Wagonblast, better known as the voice of the MTA. Plus, activists from the group, Gaze Against Guns, will serve as a non-profit grand marshal. New York City's Pride March, which is the biggest in the world, is held on the last Sunday in June every year to mark the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. A women's shelter in downtown Brooklyn is making life harder for many of the residents there. Coming up, we look into the conditions at the Tillery Street Shelter for women with mental illness. That's after a quick break. New York City has a legal right to shelter.

If you need a bed, the system is supposed to provide. provide you one. But a new WNYC and Gothamist investigation finds that one of the city's largest shelters for women with complex needs has become a place where violence and chaos are part of daily life. At the Tilleries Street Women's Shelter in downtown Brooklyn, there were at least 260 fights in 2024, more than 2,000 calls to 911. And in the city's last fiscal year, a rate of serious incidents more than double the citywide average. Women who stayed there say they didn't feel safe. Some say they'd rather take their chances outside than go back to the shelter. WMYC and Gothamist editor Andrew Jambroni spent months reporting on this one. Hey, Andrew. Hey, Janay. Before we get into

all of this reporting, what's one moment that really captures what this place can actually be like? Sure. So let's go back to September 2024. At the time, there was a big fight on the elevator at the Tilleries Street Women's Shelter where two women who lived there started brawling over a dispute about pressing the elevator's buttons. One of the women said she really had to go to the bathroom and she told the other woman, don't touch the buttons like, I need to get upstairs. And the other woman didn't take it well and they ended up getting into pretty serious. fight on the elevator in what one resident called a bloodbath. The staff eventually called 911, but the woman who was battered in the situation declined medical tension and pressing charges. A couple of months later in November of that year, I heard about this from one of the women who was living there at the time. She said another two residents got into a fight in a dorm room at the shelter when one of them said she had to use the bathroom, someone else was using it. again, things escalated pretty quickly, and one of those women bit off a chunk of the other

woman's ear. No. Yeah. I was pretty shocked at first when I heard that myself, but this was all confirmed through prosecutors, residents who were there and saw it. And this woman who was living there at the time, her name's Lydia Alamo, she saw this all happened. And she told me she was horrified not only by this particular incident, but other episodes

while she was at Tilly. I was living there for six months. And through them six months, I went through a lot. I saw a lot. You know, females fighting and getting their ears bitten off, you know, and stuff like that, you know, that's trauma. You understand? And people not getting the care that they need.

Yeah, I'm certain that's a traumatic experience for Lydia. Yeah. We know that there are many different types of shelters. This one is a women's shelter, but what does it actually look like day to day? Sure. So it's located right downtown in Brooklyn on Tilleri Street near an entrance to the BQE. It has 200 beds. So it's one of the larger shelters in the city. And it's also one of the biggest for specifically people with mental illness and addiction issue. It's a dorm-style setting. So when you go in, you'll see anywhere from eight to ten women staying in a room, and each room has a bathroom. There's lounges on each floor. There's a cafeteria where all the meals are served. And if you think about it, it's right in the middle of all this activity in Brooklyn. It's Fort Green, Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo. But this is supposed to be a safe place for women, and it's been open since 2003. You know, Andrew, I'm thinking about this shelter and how it's meant for women with complex needs. With that in mind, like should fights and disturbances like this be expected? I don't think anyone wants them to be happening, especially in shelters where, you know, some of the city's most vulnerable residents are living when they're between housing or, you know,

just trying to figure out their situation. But what we can say is that there were at least 260 fights in disputes back in 2024. That was up 72 percent from 2019. So after the pandemic, things really, according to these reports, increased. Many of them involved a serious injury or some kind of weapon. And then when you look at the data coming from the city directly, it's all organized in different priority categories. And so what they call priority one serious incidents, so assaults, arrests, overdoses, medical crises, deaths, those at Taylory were more than double the citywide average

for single adult shelters last year. You know, like you mentioned, there's a lot of 911 calls at the shelter as well. There was more than 2000 in 2024 alone. Yeah. Or about six a day. That's really a lot. Yeah. The police and EMS are almost there all the time.

Yeah, so six calls a day, though, what's happening in those moments? Well, typically there's some kind of medical episode. People start screaming at each other. Someone will call 911 on staff or a security. Sometimes the residents themselves do. And then emergency services will respond. Sometimes people are arrested at the site. A lot of the times people are taken to the hospitalization.

So just looking at the data, they're remembering. more than 360 arrests and about 2,900 hospitalizations related to Tilleri from 2019 to 2024, the period I was looking at. And so former resident Delisa Dandridge lived there for about three weeks in January of last year. Here's what she said. What was that like for you to witness that and to be in that environment? Had you ever experienced anything like that before? I had a girl's foot on me. I'm seeing people get stabbed and bleach poured on them. and saying people get beat up, hitting the head with canes. Oh, yeah.

This is terrible. You know, it's certainly a really intense place to live. And again, just looking at the data, which I obtained through a freedom of information request with the city, there were more than 5,500 serious health and safety incidents from 2019 through 2024 artillery in that period. 20 of those were deaths, including a couple of suicides, overdoses. and deaths from pre-existing medical conditions. It's important to note there weren't any homicides reported, so as far as we know, there weren't any murders at the shelter.

But, you know, in talking with residents for this story, people have lived there. They describe constant fighting, open drug use, theft. Lisa Hamner said it felt like a prison. All of it, just the violence, the lack of care, the just... It didn't seem like a place that was going to help anyone get better or get back on their feet. I didn't want to say it, but it is certainly giving prison vibes. When something like this does break out, Andrew, what does the staff do?

So a lot of the residents I spoke with complained that the staff and the guards who are at Tilleri don't actually step in and stop violence. Here's Lydia Alamo again. There's been so much that's been going on until. that staff that they'll let, you know, females fight each other for a certain, a period amount of time. And they wouldn't do anything. We're talking about five, 10, 15 minutes. I feel like they don't care. Like, it's sad.

And I wouldn't want nobody to go through what they're going through. Man, that's unfortunate. it. Yeah, it certainly is, Jeney. And, you know, here's the thing. The staff and the guards at the shelter are generally instructed not to physically intervene in fights so they can't put their hands on residence. And now, you know, that's city officials and the people who are running the shelter told me that's to prevent violence from escalating. Sure. And the protocol is for them to call police or emergency responders when something breaks out. But the residents I spoke with said a lot of the time, by the time help arrives, people are already badly hurt.

And this isn't something, you know, that's new, right? No, the shelter's been around for more than 20 years. It opened in 2003, like I said. And in reviewing media clips from the time and just doing my research, it was already drawing attention for violence as early as 2006-2007. So this 2007 Daily News article I found reported that there were nearly a thousand 911 calls. at Tillerie the year before. And I looked at court records for this story.

In 2014, a jury awarded a $13 million verdict after a social worker at the shelter was really seriously assaulted, she said, by a resident. And she needed spinal surgery. And basically the outcome of that case was that the shelters had let the resident back in after she'd already threatened staff leading to this lawsuit. You know, the thing I looked into for this story is state inspection reports because all city shelters are licensed and certified by New York State. In 2015, the report described staff struggling with residents' health needs, you know,

all these different conditions of people living in one place. The next year, the inspection showed security was lacking after a, number of critical incidents in a short period of just three weeks. And again, just to like think about the 911 calls that this shelter is getting every year, they rose from 15% from 2019 to 2024. And the residents I spoke with say little has changed. Obviously, the city is privy to all of this information. How has nothing been done yet? Yeah, and that's the question I grappled with a lot through this reporting. If you talk with homeless advocates, what they'll say is that there isn't really strong oversight of the city's shelter system on a day-to-day level. You've got to

think about the numbers and the sort of enormity of the system here. There's hundreds of shelters across the city, at least 90 different nonprofits that the city contracts with to run operations at those shelters. So it's a really big network of different players. I understand that, but how many shelters are there in the city housing people with complex issues like the women in this specific shelter. Yeah. And what I was able to find through city data is that there's about 40 specific mental health shelters that are designated that way in the city. At the same time, Tilleri is one of the bigger ones among those in terms of the bed count, so 200 here and then the annual budget for the shelter. Are we seeing violence like this at any other city shelter?

There are certainly incidents of violence and other emergencies like across the whole shelter system. I think, you know, what stood out about Tilleri was just the really high prevalence compared to all those other places. And, you know, when I spoke with experts, they say these kinds of shelters that are big, you know, congregate settings. There's no privacy. Everyone's up in each other's space. They're almost dangerous by design. Even small incidents can, you know, get out of hand really quickly. And as we already talked about, like, there's not meaningful intervention when that happens. And so one 2024 study I found out of Canada found that smaller shelters with more privacy could reduce violence and other types of conflicts between residents. And yeah, advocates say the model really needs to change. They're calling for smaller facilities with more specialized services, more efficient placements into permanent housing. So people aren't languishing in shelter for months.

more than a year. Who's running this place, Andrew? So up until the beginning of this year, it was a nonprofit called the Institute for Community Living. And they'd been running Tilly for a long time more than 16 years. And their most recent contract for the site was worth up to $60 million over that period. So they got all the costs reimbursed through the city. But that changed at the beginning of this year. The Institute asked the city to transfer its contract to, a different nonprofit provider before the contract was up for renewal this coming summer. And that's pretty rare. You know, speaking with homeless advocates and people who work in the industry, they say it's

only really a handful of times they can recall where a shelter in the middle of a contract switched from one provider to another. I obviously spoke with the Institute for Community Living for this story. I wanted to hear what their perspective and their account was and their CEO. Joe D. Rudin said Tilleri's population was tough to serve and the organization would prefer not to run such a large facility. And when I asked her what she would say to the women who shared painful memories of the place with me, she apologized. I would say, I am really sorry that you did not have a bit of experience here. We want to learn from it. And I asked them, why did they want to make the change? Why did they want to get out of the contract? They wouldn't tell me on the record. But what we can say is that, But another nonprofit called the Bowery Residence Committee, it's a big shelter provider in the city took over on January 1st of this year. Okay. And they say they brought a new staff, gotten additional positions, hired, and retrained some of the existing employees at Tilleri.

But up to this point, a lot of the current residents, people have lived there in recent months, say the conditions haven't really changed all that much. One of those residents I spoke with recently, her name is Nayaia Burns. She was pretty disappointed with how the shelter was being run. I feel as though they wanted to take over this contract, and it doesn't make sense for them to get the paychecks that they want, but let's not get the help that we need. And Nayaia, you know, says she was assaulted inside the shelter by someone she described as a random stranger. This was in March of this year. She says it happened actually as staff and security were escorting her out of the cafe. after another confrontation she was involved in with a woman she says was harassing her.

And she says experiences like that are why she doesn't think the conditions that Tilleri have improved. And she was actually transferred to another shelter under what's called a safety transfer in April. Nothing is going to be done over here because they're not living it. They have to physically be living it. I give them one week. I say give all the people in DHS one week to live. under these conditions. And after two days, I bet you don't want to change stuff. So this has happened under the new nonprofit, the Bowery Residence Committee. Yes. And I should note, that organization at its head, Muzzy Rosenblatt, say they're confident

they can improve conditions at Tillery and the outcomes for the residents. So who's actually responsible for fixing this? So the City Department of Homeless Services is the agency that oversees the whole shelter system. Like I said, the day-to-day operations are run by these dozens of contracted nonprofits. And the state, through its Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, inspects, and certifies shelters. I asked all of these different agencies for comment for the story and worked with them on making sure we had our facts straight. The state says it reviews serious incidents and inspected Tillery last year but found no deficiencies in its staff or services. Yep, that was for their annual

inspection in 2025, and then also this agency pointed to the city as the party responsible for the daily safety of staff and residents. Now, the city, the Department of Homeland Services, says it's, you know, strengthen its accountability mechanisms for nonprofits in recent years. But, you know, like I mentioned, a lot of the advocates I spoke with for this story, say, daily oversight of these shelters with this third-party management system is essentially thin to none. I wanted to hear from elected officials, people who are responsible for the state of affairs in the city, and for a lot of months throughout my reporting, they were largely silent. The public advocates office didn't respond. Local council members took a while to get back to me if they said anything at all.

and there's a whole host of people who could have say over what's going on at the shelter, but no one seems to be taking big action yet. And no word from Mayor Mundani. Well, after he came into office in January, I obviously reached out to his team at City Hall for their take. And they pointed to the new management at Tilleri, Bowery Residence Committee, and said that his administration is going to work closely with them to make sure this shelter and others throughout the city are safe and dignified for residents.

Time will tell if things actually change the Tilly. And, you know, among the other city leaders I reached out to Crystal Hudson, she's the local council member for the district Tilleries located in. And as of this year, she actually chairs the city council committee that oversees the Department of Homa Services. After this investigation came out, she said it really shows why the city needs to reassess shelters like this. And she says a glaring part of the problem is people are choosing to stay out of shelters because of the violence and dysfunction outside, which is exactly what happened

with several of the women I spoke to for this reporting. If they have been provided many different options to be in shelter, and for a number of different reasons, they do not want to be in shelter and they'd rather sleep on the street than, you know, under a roof, then that means that our system is not working the way it's intended to work, right? Have you heard from any of the women who spoke to you for this story since it came out? Yes, they were really grateful for having their voices heard. Some of them said it was like they were finally being listened to about what they experienced at Tilleray in the city's shelter system. Two of them we heard from earlier, Delisa and Naesia both texted me saying, thank you for exposing the truth and hearing me.

And I also spoke with Miranda Morales. We haven't heard from her, but she was one of the first women who spoke with us for this reporting. She lived at Tilleri about a year and a half ago. I asked her what she wants people to take away from her experience. And, you know, she said it's part of the city's larger affordability crisis that affects so many people. And it just makes me realize this has been ignored, widely ignored, by so many institutions which should have been on this. And I'm just thankful. I'm really thankful. You know, at the end of the day, that's, I think, what journalism is all about.

Yeah, definitely. That's WNYC's Andrew Jambroney. Thanks a lot, Andrew. And thank you for listening to NYC now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.