NYC scrambles with $25M game plan for winter after 15 died in last cold snap

City Hall is bracing for the cold months after 15 people died on the streets last winter – as Mayor Zohran Mamdani unveiled a plan to change the haphazard way outreach workers responded to 311 calls.Hizzoner announced a $25 million investment aimed at getting more homeless New Yorkers indoors when temperatures drop as part of a scramble to avoid another deadly cold snap.The plan revealed by city officials Monday morning seeks to scale up the city’s “Code Blue” response efforts by offering more single-room, easy-to-access shelter options for homeless individuals leery of the city’s system over safety concerns.“What we found in a lot of what we inherited was an approach that doesn’t meet the level of scale when it comes to the kind of winter that we had,” Mamdani told reporters outside of a Sanitation Department salt shed Monday. The city issues a “Code Blue” response whenever temperatures dip below freezing between 8 p.m.and 4 a.m.

— waiving capacity requirements at homeless shelters and activating a network of local outreach teams and warming centers to get homeless individuals out of deadly weather conditions. But the fledgling Mamdani administration faced scrutiny out of the gate this year when 19 New Yorkers were found dead outside during the weeks-long freeze – with hypothermia contributing to at least 15 of those deaths.Hizzoner admitted the city was changing the way it responded, though he did not go as far to acknowledge his administration botched its response last winter.“The winter that we had was not a winter that was like the year before or the year before that; it was the first blizzard in a decade,” Mamdani told reporters.“And so what we have found is an incredible city workforce that did everything that they could, and now developing policies that build upon it.”The $25 million in new funding will add over 600 single and double occupancy units equating to 800 total beds – a 30% capacity boost from this past winte...