A state Supreme Court judge on Thursday blocked the city from closing Mainchance, a drop-in center on East 32nd Street between Park and Lexington Avenues in East Midtown that has provided homeless New Yorkers with meals, programming, and a place to rest for more than 35 years, City Limits reported.
Justice Lynn Kotler of New York State Supreme Court issued a temporary restraining order preventing the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) from terminating its contract with the facility, which was set to expire June 30. Kotler expressed concern about reducing homeless services during a housing crisis. “They cannot terminate the contract, they have to find a way to pay for it,” she said from the bench.
DHS told the court that closing Mainchance is part of a strategic shift: the agency wants to redirect resources from open drop-in centers toward safe havens, which are low-barrier shelters with semi-private rooms and beds rather than open floor space. The city said funding for Mainchance is not included in the fiscal year 2027 budget starting July 1, as Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration works to close a gap of several billion dollars. “Sometimes DHS has to make difficult decisions,” Elisa Lee, counsel for the city, said in court Thursday. DHS declined to comment further, citing the ongoing litigation.
The agency also disclosed, in the weeks before Thursday’s hearing, that its investigators had found policy violations at Mainchance, including staff who had improperly turned away clients, allegations DHS said could rise to a breach of contract. Mainchance disputed those allegations, and lawyers for the city did not raise the investigation during the court session. Marc Gross, a lawyer who sits on Mainchance’s board and is representing the center in the litigation, argued in a motion reported by City Limits that DHS had given Mainchance no opportunity to respond before closing it: “Rather than alerting [Mainchance] to these access-related issues and affording it an opportunity to explain or correct these alleged deficiencies, [DHS’s] solution was to order that Mainchance be shut down altogether, thereby denying access to the facility by all homeless people in the neighborhood being displaced by Mainchance’s closure.” Gross said he was relieved the center would get a fuller hearing. “In the context of the housing and homeless crisis it’s hard to understand why this is happening,” he said.
Thursday’s ruling was the second time Kotler has intervened to keep Mainchance open. Two years ago, DHS moved to terminate the center’s contract before its expiration date, also citing a change in strategy. Kotler, who presided over that case as well, blocked that early termination.
The Mainchance decision is one of several recent legal setbacks for DHS’s facility plans. Earlier this year, the agency announced it would move the city’s intake for homeless adults from the Bellevue shelter, also in Midtown East, to a new site on the Lower East Side. A judge halted that move late last month after residents near the downtown location sued, according to City Limits. Two new hotel shelters in Brooklyn, planned in part to offset the beds lost from Bellevue’s pending closure, are also facing opposition from local communities, City Limits reported last month. DHS maintained that three other drop-in centers in Manhattan would continue serving the area’s homeless population and said the agency would work with Mainchance’s current clients to find new placements.
Mainchance will remain open through at least August 11, when both parties are scheduled to return to court.
