Eighteen New Yorkers have died outdoors during what Mayor Zohran Mamdani called one of the most dangerous cold stretches in the city’s history, as his administration mobilized warming centers, additional shelter beds and hundreds of street-outreach workers across all five boroughs through early February. Speaking February 9 at the opening of the Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center in East Flatbush, Mamdani said the weekend had brought the winter’s coldest and most dangerous temperatures so far, with conditions in the city colder than in parts of Antarctica, and that one additional New Yorker had died on the streets since his February 6 briefing, raising the toll to 18.
The mayor framed the response as a whole-of-government effort that had been running for weeks. According to the mayor’s office, since Monday, January 19, the city had made approximately 1,400 placements into shelters and safe havens and had involuntarily transported 33 people determined to be a danger to themselves or others. Mamdani said that across Friday and Saturday nights, as of Sunday morning, 560 New Yorkers used warming centers run by the city’s public hospital system, NYC Health + Hospitals, and nearly 300 used a Department of Homeless Services warming vehicle.
The deaths and the surge of emergency measures came as New York City Emergency Management issued repeated weather alerts. On January 30, NYCEM said it was monitoring a coastal low-pressure system expected to bring cold temperatures, breezy winds and a very small chance of light snow for Sunday, February 1, warning of wind chills as low as minus 5 degrees and slick roads as the city continued recovering from a storm the prior weekend that the agency said dropped more than a foot of snow in some areas. NYCEM Commissioner Zach Iscol said even light additional snowfall and extreme cold could create challenges, and urged New Yorkers to look out for their neighbors and travel carefully. In a statement carried by the mayor’s office, Mamdani said the city could be facing what could be the harshest stretch of cold weather in New York City history.
NYCEM issued a second, broader alert on February 6 running through February 10, and said the city was under an Extreme Cold Warning from 10 a.m. Saturday, February 7, through 1 p.m. Sunday, February 8. The agency, citing the National Weather Service, said temperatures would stay below freezing throughout the period, with light snow and flurries expected Friday night into Saturday morning and accumulation likely between half an inch and one inch citywide, with slightly higher amounts possible in eastern Queens and on Long Island. Mamdani said the temperatures were dangerous and even brief time outdoors could be life-threatening, adding that the city was intensifying outreach to its most vulnerable neighbors and opening warming centers in every borough so no one was left without a heated place to go. He urged residents to stay indoors when possible and to call 311 if they saw someone who needed help or if their own heat was not working.
At a February 6 winter weather briefing, Mamdani said an arctic front continued to bear down on the city and that New York remained in a cold Code Blue, with real-feel temperatures expected to plummet to 10 below in what he called lethal conditions. The mayor said that for nearly three weeks outreach teams had been traversing every borough, and that since January 19 the city had made more than 1,250 placements into shelters and safe havens and involuntarily transported 27 people deemed a danger to themselves or others. He said 17 New Yorkers had died outside during the prolonged cold at that point, and noted that the previous night the city had doubled the number of shelter placements from the night before, which he described as a sign that expanded outreach and options were making a difference.
The mayor’s office said that ahead of the two coldest days, the city was adding roughly 65 new hotel shelter units for individuals reluctant to accept congregate settings, operating 62 warming centers and vehicles, reopening 10 public schools as warming centers, adding two new CUNY warming centers, and partnering with two overdose prevention centers to remain open 24 hours a day over the weekend for their clients. In a separate February 6 announcement, the administration said it was activating new street-outreach workers, mobilizing additional mobile warming units staffed with clinicians, and recruiting health care professionals, nonprofits and providers to open more warming facilities. The mayor’s office said that earlier that week the city had opened 50 safe haven beds in Upper Manhattan and expedited the opening of a 106-bed safe haven shelter in Lower Manhattan.
On February 7, ahead of what the administration called the coldest night of the winter, the mayor’s office said the city had accelerated the opening of 48 new safe haven beds in the Bronx the previous night for homeless people resistant to traditional shelter, carried out with support from the Department of Social Services and the Department of Buildings. The administration said it had deployed more than 150 additional outreach workers on top of the more than 400 Department of Homeless Services outreach staff already working around the clock, along with more than 50 school nurses. The mayor’s office said that since January 19 the city had made more than 1,300 shelter placements and involuntarily transported 29 New Yorkers. The Department of Education announced it was supporting two additional warming centers, in Far Rockaway and Washington Heights, beyond the 10 reopened school-based centers announced the day before. Responding to community concerns, Mamdani also directed agencies to increase the size and visibility of signage and labeling on warming vehicles and at warming centers across all five boroughs.
Mamdani visited frontline workers as the cold deepened. The mayor’s office said he traveled to Staten Island on February 7 to thank firefighters and emergency medical service workers, and on Sunday, February 8, he visited a Manhattan warming center, where the office said he met with homeless New Yorkers and thanked city workers, nonprofit partners and volunteers. The administration said the new hotel units, warming centers and vehicles brought the total number of warming facilities citywide higher heading into the weekend, and Mamdani again urged residents to stay indoors and to call 311 on behalf of anyone outside who needed help.
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, who appeared alongside Mamdani at the Shirley Chisholm Recreation Center opening, also weighed in on the deaths. In a bulletin from his office, Williams called it heartbreaking that as many as 17 neighbors had lost their lives in the cold — a figure that rose to 18 by the time of the February 9 event — and said there must be a full accounting of what led to the losses and expanded efforts to provide support, which he said his office was pushing for and which the administration appeared to be pursuing. Williams said he had joined a team conducting outreach to help people find safe shelter and urged New Yorkers to take precautions, check on neighbors and call 311 if someone needed aid. His office also pointed to a winter storm preparedness and safety guide on the public advocate’s website.
The winter emergency unfolded alongside the new mayor’s broader agenda. The mayor’s office said Mamdani’s January 30 public schedule included a press conference in Long Island City to make a worker-protection announcement alongside Department of Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine, followed by a visit to a home-based child care provider to encourage families to apply for 3-K and Pre-K. The dangers of winter also surfaced in safety alerts unrelated to the cold itself: the public-safety app Citizen reported January 29 that two people were injured in an e-bike fire on the second floor of a four-story building, with fire and EMS operations concluded.
