Binghamton has launched a $3 million street outreach initiative aimed at clearing tent communities along the city's riverfronts, but advocates for people experiencing homelessness say the plan focuses more on removing encampments than solving the housing crisis behind them. The initiative, called Open Doors, Safe Spaces, arrives months after a deadly motel fire in Endicott left dozens of Broome County residents without emergency shelter.
Mayor Jared Kraham said the city will partner with Catholic Charities of Broome County to pay housing subsidies for people currently living in encampments, according to WBNG. Street outreach teams are expected to visit each encampment to help move residents into housing, while the city's Department of Public Works will clear trash once a site is vacated and the Binghamton Police Department will enforce permanent closure of those public spaces to camping, according to the Spectrum News report by Emily Kenny. City Council Majority Leader Rebecca Rathmell said Binghamton hopes to provide housing for 100 people currently living on the street along with another 180 people cycling through the shelter system, per that same report.
Masai Andrews, an advocate for people experiencing homelessness in Broome County, told Spectrum News he is skeptical the plan goes far enough. He estimated the county has close to 2,500 people who access emergency shelter services over the course of a year, and said potentially adding around 200 units falls far short of what is needed. “It seems like, from my perspective, the focus is more on getting rid of encampments than getting rid of homelessness,” Andrews said, according to the outlet, and he urged careful monitoring as the initiative is rolled out.
A Mother's Firsthand Frustration
Monica Indigo Jones, a single mother of three who lost her housing in August 2025, has lived in several Broome County hotels since then and voiced her own doubts about the city's approach. She criticized what she described as top-down decisions and said local leaders need to pursue solutions with input from the people actually experiencing homelessness, per the same Spectrum News account. Jones said homeless people should be directly involved in developing the policies meant to help them.
Advocates quoted by WBNG also pointed to conditions inside the motel-based emergency shelter system that families like Jones's have relied on, including curfews that do not align with work schedules and relocation cycles that force people to move roughly every 28 days. Those grievances echo complaints that surfaced earlier this year after a fire tore through the Knights Inn in Endicott, killing six people and displacing dozens more. For 24 days in June, tents lined Hawley Street outside Binghamton City Hall in the fire's aftermath, as WBNG reported.
County Scrambled After the Knights Inn Fire
Broome County Executive Jason Garnar said in July that the county had nowhere to place people after the Knights Inn fire and another hotel went offline at roughly the same time, according to Spectrum News. County officials had already opened a request for proposals in May seeking a partner organization to help end the county's reliance on hotels and motels as emergency shelters, and Spectrum Local News reported the county received some proposals for that project, though officials have announced no further updates since.
The scale of the problem has been building for years. According to the WBNG report on the region's homelessness crisis, Broome County's spending on motel shelter jumped from about $500,000 in 2019 to $9.5 million in 2025, and a regional point-in-time count that tracked 317 people experiencing homelessness in 2020 found more than 1,000 across the Southern Tier by 2025. A 2023 Broome County study found the area needs an additional 6,000 units of permanent housing to accommodate its current population, per Spectrum Local News.
Regional Numbers Tell a Mixed Story
Not every figure points the same direction. WSKG reported that the Continuum of Care covering Broome, Otsego, Chenango, Delaware, Cortland, and Tioga counties saw a 35 percent increase in people experiencing homelessness in its 2025 count, with children making up around 19 percent of that population, even as statewide homelessness in New York fell by around 8 percent that same year. A county-commissioned housing needs study published in 2024 found nearly half of renter households in the area spent at least half their income on housing, according to New York Focus, which also reported that the county's Department of Social Services had placed 56 of the people staying at the Knights Inn there on the day of the fire.
Binghamton officials have highlighted Community Solutions' role in Open Doors, Safe Spaces. The initiative draws on support from the nonprofit, and Kraham and Rathmell facilitated a two-day workshop earlier this year that included a presentation from the organization, according to the binghamtonhomepage.com report.
Elmira's Harder Line Looms in the Background
Andrews pointed to a recent example from elsewhere in the region as a cautionary tale. He told Spectrum News that Elmira recently banned encampments, describing what he characterized as a strict ban on tents, sleeping bags, and visibly being homeless in that city. Elmira's City Council did pass an ordinance in November 2024 prohibiting camping outside designated family camping sites in a 5-2 vote, according to WSKG, with penalties that can include up to a $1,000 fine and one year in jail. That ordinance also changed how quickly Chemung County's Department of Social Services must respond to a reported prohibited campsite, from 48 hours to whenever feasible, per the same WSKG report.
Back in Binghamton, Mayor Kraham has defended the new approach as a necessary departure from past practice. “The status quo is not working,” Kraham said, according to Spectrum News, framing the city's partnership with Catholic Charities and Community Solutions as the first use of this strategy by any city in New York. Whether it reaches the roughly 2,500 people Andrews says access emergency shelter services throughout the year remains an open question for the advocates and residents watching the rollout.
