Homeless women sought shelter in NYC. They found chronic violence and dysfunction.

The bloodstains on the elevator at the Tillary Street Women’s Shelter lingered for days.

Two residents of the 200-bed homeless shelter in Downtown Brooklyn had gotten into a brawl in early September 2024, when one of them told the other not to press the elevator’s buttons because she needed to go use the bathroom and did not want to wait longer, according to facility records and three people with knowledge of the event. One woman punched the other so hard in the face that blood splattered on the floor and walls. Staff called 911 and emergency responders came, but the battered woman declined medical attention and pressing charges.

“Everyone was like, ‘Did you see the bloodbath?’” said Cook, a former resident who had moved in hours before the altercation, and asked that her first name be withheld out of concern her history of homelessness would affect her ability to find work. “They were just in shock.”

Tillary is among New York City’s biggest shelters for people with mental illness and addiction. The dorm-style facility is meant to be a safe harbor for vulnerable women, tucked amid some of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods.

But a Gothamist investigation shows reports of violence and other emergencies at the shelter have increased substantially in recent years. At least 260 fights and disputes erupted at Tillary in 2024, up 72% from 2019, according to city data. Many involved a major injury or a weapon of some kind. Last fiscal year, Tillary’s rate of “priority-one serious incidents” — including assaults, arrests, medical crises, overdoses and deaths — was more than double the citywide average for single-adult shelters. The facility has been the subject of thousands of 911 calls over the past decade. Its problems appear only to have worsened in that time, as the city began requiring shelters to report more kinds of incidents to enhance transparency.

The mounting chaos at Tillary demonstrates why some homeless people are reluctant to enter city shelters, even as living on the streets presents its own dangers. Homelessness and policy experts say the situation has made it more difficult for many of the facility’s residents to receive treatment and exit into long-term housing.

“I just didn’t feel like a human,” Cook said. She left Tillary after a month, moving temporarily to a halfway house in South Brooklyn. The shelter system, she added, is not merely “broken … it’s abusive.”

In January, city officials unexpectedly turned the shelter over to a new nonprofit to manage operations. A representative for the previous provider, the Institute for Community Living, confirmed it asked the city to transfer responsibilities before its $60 million contract was up for potential renewal this summer. President and CEO Jody Rudin told Gothamist in an interview before the change that her organization would prefer not to run such a large facility, saying Tillary’s population was tough to serve. Handovers between shelter providers in the middle of city contracts are rare, according to homeless advocates and others in the industry.

The new provider, the Bowery Residents’ Committee, has promised to improve conditions at Tillary. Its leaders say they have already brought in new staff, found funding for extra positions and retrained existing employees. But some residents have expressed skepticism about whether the environment and services will get better, and both experts and former staff say the shelter’s problems go beyond any one operator. They argue Tillary’s troubles are the result of blending residents with vastly different health issues in close quarters, the inability of staff to intervene in violent outbursts, and a lack of robust monitoring by regulators and lawmakers.

“There is barely any oversight over the daily workings of contracted nonprofit shelters,” said Deborah Berkman, director of the New York Legal Assistance Group’s shelter and economic stability project. “Nobody’s watching, and given that nobody’s watching, there’s no impetus to get better.”

Gothamist interviewed nearly 50 current and former residents, staff, officials, lawmakers and advocates; combed through years of government data and inspection reports obtained through public records requests; and reviewed scores of photos, videos and civil lawsuits to get an intimate look inside Tillary. Some women said they fled the shelter — or kept to themselves as much as possible while there — because they feared for their safety and were desperate to get out.

Longtime homelessness officials and the Institute for Community Living defended their supervision of the facility, saying dozens of the women successfully stabilize and move into homes each year. They emphasized the residents are challenging to care for due to their complex medical and trauma histories, as well as the shelter’s size and configuration.

Joe Calvello, Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s press secretary, said Mamdani's administration will work closely with Tillary’s new operator to “refresh the site and continue adapting to the evolving needs of the community” as part of a broader push to revamp the city’s shelter system. City Hall neither detailed those plans nor answered questions about what they will entail.

History of dysfunction

Tillary occupies an eight-story building that overlooks the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and once housed student dormitories. It sits in the shadow of a new mixed-income residential tower marketed with luxe amenities like rooftop terraces and a pickleball court. The surrounding areas of Fort Greene, Brooklyn Heights and Dumbo make up one of the city’s wealthiest and most elite enclaves.

But inside the shelter, life is very different. Privacy is almost nonexistent. Around eight or more residents each share a room and bathroom. Substance use and theft are common throughout the building, and altercations routinely break out in the cafeteria where meals are served, according to residents, former staff and internal incident logs.

Dangerous conditions at the facility go back more than two decades and have only worsened over time, Gothamist’s review of city data and media reports found.

Within a few years of opening in 2003, the shelter started drawing attention for violence and disorder. In 2007, the Daily News reported Tillary was the source of nearly a thousand 911 calls the preceding year, most for ambulances and disputes.

In 2014, a jury awarded a $13 million verdict in a lawsuit brought by a social worker who was so severely assaulted by a resident that she needed cervical fusion surgery and a permanent spinal cord stimulator to relieve her pain, according to several news reports and the worker’s attorney. The jury found the security firm that guarded Tillary at the time allowed the resident back inside after she threatened staff hours earlier.

A state inspector visiting the site in 2015 noted its employees faced numerous obstacles.

“It appears that despite their enthusiasm and dedication, the staff is struggling with the women’s complex mental health histories and other needs,” the inspector’s annual report states. “[T]he number of challenging cases is daunting.”

The next year, another state inspection determined security was “lacking” due to the sheer number of critical incidents logged in early 2016 — seven within a period of less than three weeks. Those included a woman who was “badly beaten," and another resident who “continued to resist and yell” as she was restrained by police.

Tillary residents say little has improved since.

While some women said the shelter’s employees provided support for their health issues and housing searches, others described incessant fighting that made the place feel unsafe and drove residents away.

“I could go in and out, but while I was in the building it felt like a prison,” said Lisa Hamner, who lived there from 2016 to 2017. “All of it, just the violence, the lack of care … it didn’t seem like a place that was going to help anyone get better or get back on their feet.”

NYPD data shows annual 911 calls to the building rose 15% from 2019 to 2024, to more than 2,060 — or nearly six a day on average, and more than double the number two decades ago. In one, a resident bit off a chunk of another resident’s ear in November 2024 after demanding entry to one of the dorm’s bathrooms while someone else was using it. The victim was sent to a hospital and the assailant arrested, law enforcement officials and a witness said. City records show at least 360 arrests and 2,900 hospitalizations tied to Tillary over the same period.

Brad Weekes, an NYPD spokesperson, said officers from the local precinct’s quality-of-life team are in regular contact with the shelter and collaborate with staff to address crime. Tillary is also within one of the department's designated violence reduction zones, which means officers are usually on foot patrols nearby, he added.

Darren O’Sullivan, a spokesperson for the state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance, which inspects and certifies New York shelters, said the agency “reviews every serious incident report to ensure it was appropriately handled and follows up when necessary.” The agency said it last inspected Tillary — unannounced — last year, and did not identify deficiencies in staffing or services.

O’Sullivan did not address specific questions about the shelter’s high rate of violence and emergencies, saying in a statement that New York City officials are “responsible for ensuring the day-to-day safety of residents and staff.”

The city Department of Homeless Services said over the past several years it has “reinforced” its accountability mechanisms for the approximately 90 shelter providers it works with, and regularly reviews their performance on safety, housing placements and building maintenance.

“We also recognize the complex challenges and limitations they face as shelters serve as the system of last resort for New Yorkers who have been failed by multiple levels of society and the larger safety net,” spokesperson Neha Sharma said in a statement.

But Diana Ayala, who until the end of December chaired the City Council committee overseeing the department, said the sprawling network of contractors the city depends on to fulfill its legal duty to provide shelter are also responsible for that safety.

“This is exactly why we have the number of people we do sleeping on streets, because they don’t feel safe in shelter,” she told Gothamist in October, when informed of the tumultuous conditions at Tillary. “The system is so large. We rely on nonprofit partners to do a good job.”

Pressure-cooker environment

Tillary’s biggest drivers of violence, according to policy experts, former staff and residents, are its open, communal setting across multiple floors and high volume of people with varying mental health needs.

Many of the women referred to the shelter by the Department of Homeless Services have significant behavioral health diagnoses, including substance addiction, but they are not the only residents funneled there. Some have come to escape violence at home or on the streets simply to find more at Tillary.

“We have no history of drug or alcohol abuse or severe mental illness, and they send us to a mental illness facility,” said Miranda Morales, who recounted being assaulted outside the building by another resident in September 2024 in a confrontation over a cigarette. “It’s insane.”

Tillary’s directors stressed they do not control who comes through the front door. As long as beds are available, all city-funded shelters like it must accept any resident assigned to them by central intake centers, regardless of someone’s criminal record or health status.

Roughly 2,500 individual people with a wide swath of medical, housing and other needs cycled through the shelter between 2019 and 2024, officials said — enough to fill it a dozen times. In this period before and after the coronavirus pandemic, residents faced more than 5,500 health and safety incidents deemed serious enough to report, or around 930 annually — a ratio of more than two per resident — according to Department of Homeless Services records Gothamist obtained through a Freedom of Information request. The numbers have been on the upswing, peaking at more than 1,050 in 2023.

Part of that increase, city officials said, was due to an expansion starting in 2017 in the types of incidents that must be reported, which shelters have enacted over time. Not all of the incidents are violent altercations; some highlight maintenance issues like a broken elevator and infectious disease cases like COVID-19. Officials said the broader reporting scope helps them track events more precisely in real time, but they did not specify how much of the uptick in incidents was attributable to the change in reporting.

More than 1,000 incidents were classified as “priority one,” the highest level of urgency, including about 140 fights where someone was seriously injured or a weapon was involved. Tillary recorded a 69% jump in priority-one incidents over the six-year window. Among them were 20 fatalities, including two suicides, multiple overdoses and deaths from pre-existing medical conditions, but no homicides.

Tillary’s volatility reflects an overwhelmed shelter system where people are put in high-density settings unmatched to their needs and employees are inundated by caseloads, according to homeless advocates. The site is one of the city’s approximately 40 mental health shelters and has among the largest bed counts and budgets within that group, city records show.

“The mixing of the populations and just the general setup of the shelter is going to give rise to situations that are completely inhumane,” said Mary Brosnahan, who led the Coalition for the Homeless advocacy group for 30 years.

“It’s chaotic by nature, it’s overcrowded and even the frontline workers with the best of intentions struggle just to make sure that women are complying with their medication or making their appointments needed to fill out their housing applications,” she added. “It’s just too large, and the city should be moving to not only smaller facilities but also downsizing these facilities by moving women into permanent housing.”

A 2024 study out of Ontario, Canada, found smaller shelters with more privacy and autonomy for clients could reduce violence and other dangers.

“It’s not rocket science in terms of what works,” said Kathryn Kliff, staff attorney at the nonprofit Legal Aid Society. “The city has to meet its right-to-shelter mandate and have enough beds for everyone, but we know these large congregate mental health shelters are not the best way to provide services.”

Warren Wright, who served for years as Tillary’s program director before the pandemic, said some of the shelter’s residents should receive services in more suitable environments for their health needs, whether physical, mental or drug rehabilitation.

“That would alleviate a great deal of those fights, those hospitalizations and that disgruntledness among them,” he said. “With all of these disabilities under one setting, you’re asking a person to put a Band-Aid on a gunshot wound.”

Limited tools when violence erupts

Cook, who had the bloody introduction to Tillary with the fight on the elevator, said workers at the shelter were often slow to act when scuffles broke out.

“The guards just watch, they often laugh,” she said. “So you kind of had this sense you could do anything and there’s no consequences at all.”

According to homelessness and nonprofit officials, guards and shelter staff have few options under standard operating procedures when violence flares up. Instead, they depend on police to quell outbursts and are instructed not to touch residents in order to avoid escalating tensions.

First responders handled more than 1,800 emergency calls to Tillary’s address last year alone, police data shows. But when fights have gotten out of hand, people were often badly hurt by the time help arrived, according to city records and interviews with both residents and former staff.

A spokesperson for Allied Universal, which supplies the shelter’s guards, said the company takes all allegations seriously and works with its customers to tackle any problems. The guards are primarily there, she noted, to deter crime and relay any unlawful activities to police.

Leaders at the Department of Homeless Services and Institute for Community Living, which ran the shelter until the end of 2025, said they were focused on getting Tillary residents into stable housing — not on heavy-handed enforcement of facility rules. They cited city shelter obligations to generally provide a bed to anyone who needs one, and bureaucratic hurdles around transfers, as preventing them from easily removing residents who violate policies or cause altercations.

Residents who are attacked or harassed at Tillary are offered “safety transfers” to other shelters, administrators said, though a spokesperson for the institute said it did not track how often such transfers occurred while it was in charge of the site. Incident reports obtained by Gothamist show at least 100 safety transfers were offered from 2019 to 2024.

Some former residents and employees, however, said complaints and safety concerns are consistently ignored or not addressed in a timely manner.

“Staff don’t do s---. They just sit there and watch and be entertained,” said Lydia Alamo, who lived at the shelter from 2024 to 2025. She recalled numerous instances of residents assaulting other residents, as well as women being drunk or high, without workers taking immediate action.

“You’re supposed to ease somebody’s mental [health], not put more stress on [it],” Alamo added. “I tell them that all the time: ‘You don’t make it better for us, you make it worse for us.’”

In one case in 2017, a Tillary resident alleged in a lawsuit against the city and the shelter’s contractors that she reported two other residents for threatening and attacking her inside the building. But she said management failed to intervene and she was hospitalized after the two residents later beat her with a broomstick.

The woman ultimately won a $400,000 settlement. Yet the city was shielded from liability in the matter, a spokesperson for the municipal Law Department said, noting the shelter contractors’ insurance funded the payout.

A former social services employee at Tillary, who requested anonymity because her current employer works with the Department of Homeless Services and she did not want to compromise her relationship with agency officials, said she was “completely shocked” by how the shelter’s supervisors handled residents’ complaints about inadequate security, open drug use, the difficulty of getting a transfer and the site not being appropriate for them. She said it took residents a long time to get apartments through government rental assistance programs, even when they were motivated to deal with the often-complicated process, and only a handful of those she counseled in her roughly two years at Tillary did so while she worked there.

“The slow pace of it meant things would go wrong,” the former employee said. “I never knew why they weren’t getting an answer.”

Those delays mean many women languish for months or longer in the shelter, putting them at risk of harm and exacerbating their behavioral health symptoms, residents and homeless advocates said. They also pointed out a high rate of staff turnover has frequently disrupted residents’ casework.

In response to questions from Gothamist, Institute for Community Living spokesperson Anat Gerstein said Tillary staff received monthly trainings on de-escalation, first aid and other topics while the shelter was under the organization’s control. She added that the nonprofit reported serious incidents as required by the city and called emergency responders when necessary.

The staff helped place 87 of the facility’s residents into permanent housing last year, up 18% from 2024 but below the Department of Homeless Services’ goal of 95 placements, Gerstein said. Other city shelters run by the institute have significantly lower rates of the most urgent serious incidents and higher success rates for housing placements, according to the nonprofit, though these sites vary in size, design and type of population served.

Rudin, the organization’s CEO and once a high-ranking official within the Department of Homeless Services in the Bloomberg and de Blasio administrations, said most Tillary residents gave “reasonably good” feedback on its services when surveyed. She said the percentages of those who said they could grow, felt in charge of their treatment goals, and that the staff was culturally competent were all on the rise.

“We do think there’s a lot here that is working well,” Rudin said, pointing to in-house social and clinical offerings, along with connections to outside health care providers.

But when asked what she would tell women who described the shelter in painful terms, she apologized.

“I would say I am really sorry you did not have a good experience here,” she said. “We want to learn from it.”

City officials also said they welcomed residents’ feedback.

“We are taking important steps to improve the shelter system and have channels in place for residents to report concerns as we continue to work to strengthen supports and bolster safety for New Yorkers residing in any DHS shelter,” Sharma, the agency’s spokesperson, said in a statement.

Lack of oversight and a shelter in transition

Through months of reporting, Gothamist encountered silence from elected officials with oversight of Tillary, despite several rounds of outreach.

Spokespeople for Public Advocate Jumaane Williams, a city watchdog, did not answer repeated requests for comment. As a city councilmember in 2014, he proposed legislation to create a task force to improve shelter conditions, citing violence at Tillary.

Last October, after multiple inquiries, Councilmember Crystal Hudson, whose district includes the facility, said she was alarmed by Gothamist’s findings about Tillary’s rising number of emergencies and the overall level of serious incidents there.

“This is certainly something that I would want to make sure that we stay on top of,” she said in an interview. “I know it’s not easy to run shelters, but we have contracts in place for a reason, and we are the body that provides oversight.”

Hudson became chair of the City Council’s general welfare committee in January. Her office declined to comment last month on any action she had taken or would take on Tillary.

Councilmember Lincoln Restler, whose district borders the shelter, deferred to Hudson.

City Comptroller Mark Levine’s office, which registers city contracts and audits spending, said it will closely monitor conditions at Tillary and any issues related to the Department of Homeless Services contract to operate the site. Last year, while under then-Comptroller Brad Lander, the office declined to weigh in on the facility and its long-standing dysfunction.

The Institute for Community Living supervised Tillary for more than 16 years. The Bowery Residents’ Committee, a major shelter provider in the city, took over on Jan. 1. Its current contract term ends on June 30 and could be renewed for another term.

“BRC, at the request of DHS, was asked to assume the operations of this shelter program,” Muzzy Rosenblatt, the organization’s CEO and president, said in a statement. “We have done so with the confidence that we can and will improve the quality of care and outcomes for the people we serve.”

But Tillary residents said the handover was far from smooth and that violence and deplorable living conditions have persisted.

Nyasia Burns said she was attacked inside the building in March by a “random stranger” and was forced to defend herself against the woman. She said the woman punched her in her face twice while staff and security escorted her out of the cafeteria following a fight Burns got into with a resident who harassed her about her appearance.

“It doesn't make sense for them to get the paychecks that they want, but us not get the help that we need,” she said. Burns received a safety transfer this month to a different shelter run by the Bowery Residents’ Committee and said the atmosphere has been calmer.

Others fed up with the conditions at Tillary have taken their chances on the streets or similar precarious situations rather than stay in the shelter system.

Kara Ryles said she fled the facility in February after staff told her they could not find her paperwork and another resident threw a bottle and other objects at her. She said she has since bounced between local drop-in centers for homeless people.

“I ran for my life,” Ryles recalled. “I ran out that door from in front of the police … and I never looked back.

“I don’t think people know what’s going on,” she said of Tillary, tearing up. “Those women are so sick. They can’t even tell anyone. They’re in so much trouble. … It breaks my heart. I cry for them every day. … I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.”