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.
