While the city has largely shuttered its network of emergency shelters for migrants, homeless families are still being housed in 110 hotels, the majority of which lack kitchens. Shelter-provided food is often notoriously bad, advocates and homeless New Yorkers say, and poses particular challenges to families with kids and people with dietary restrictions.
Isabel and her adult daughter, who has cerebral palsy and has difficulty chewing and swallowing, entered New York City’s shelter system a little over a year ago.
The pair, who moved here from Peru, have been placed in different hotels around the city, and recently moved to a hotel-turned-shelter in Manhattan. There’s no kitchen there for families to use, as is the case in the vast majority of hotels that have been converted into city shelters, so the staff serve residents three meals a day.
But feeding her daughter food suitable for her digestion has been a constant battle, as the hotel shelter’s food is rarely edible for her, Isabel explained.
“I didn’t feed her the shelter food because it was bad for her,” she said in Spanish, recalling past meals like pizza, hamburgers and cereal that her daughter—who follows a diet of soft or liquid foods—couldn’t eat. “That food made her even more constipated.”
Because she works as a caregiver for elderly people, Isabel is able to buy her own meals, and admits she brings in food from outside and prepares healthier soups and purees for her daughter, though it goes against the rules at the site. The downside, she said, is that most of her salary goes to food, making it harder to save up and leave the shelter system.
“I am grateful for a roof over my head. I am very grateful,” emphasized Isabel, who asked City Limits to withhold her last name for privacy reasons. “But yes, the food is very bad, really bad.”
New York City has long turned to commercial hotels to serve as homeless shelters when pressed for space or in times of emergency, including in 2022, when thousands of new immigrants and asylum seekers began arriving from the southern border.
The city has been gradually shuttering its emergency shelters, which at the height comprised over 200 sites, as the number of new immigrant arrivals declined. But the Department of Homeless Services (DHS), which inherited the reins of what remains of this network, is still housing homeless families in 110 hotels across the city, the majority of which lack kitchens.
Shelter-provided food is often notoriously bad, advocates and homeless New Yorkers say, and poses particular challenges to families with kids and to people with dietary restrictions or health needs.
“The food is insufficient and it’s not enough to abate their hunger, especially for families with children who are coming from other countries—it’s not culturally appropriate, so adults sort of can force themselves to eat things, but children just don’t,” said Deborah Berkman, the director of the shelter and economic stability project at at New York Legal Assistance Group.
“They say that it’s extremely salty, extremely fatty, it’s not tasty. People report that it’s frozen or gone bad,” Berkman added. “Meals are only provided at very specific times, and so if you’re not at the shelter at the time the meal is provided, there’s no way to get food.”
In January, Mayor Zohran Mamdani issued an executive order requiring DHS to come up with a plan to bring its remaining emergency migrant shelters into compliance with longstanding city rules. This includes phasing out the use of hotels that fail to meet regulations for what’s known as “Tier II” shelters for families: private, apartment-style units where kitchens, or access to one, is required.
“[O]ffering families with the opportunity and autonomy to cook their own meals is always our goal, and as we phase out the use of emergency hotel shelters for families with children, we are committed to transitioning families to sites that comply with regulatory standards, including access to cooking facilities, as mandated by [the] Mayor,” DHS said in a statement.
Asking for access
The shelter system has a process for people with disabilities to access additional services through what’s known as a “reasonable accommodation” request, when the need is not apparent or obvious. DHS receives hundreds of such requests per year, but very few are approved, and the agency has turned down hundreds of shelter residents seeking kitchen access in recent years.
According to data obtained by The Coalition for the Homeless through a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request provided to City Limits, DHS approved only 11.7 percent of people’s kitchen requests (161 out of the 1,375) from January 2022 to November 2025.
When asked about the low approval rates, DHS said that each request is unique, considered on an individual basis, and evaluated under the same standards. A team of licensed clinical social workers and registered nurses assesses each request based on the documentation an applicant provides—which can include letters from doctors recommending the placement—and the unique context of the case, DHS officials explained. Yet many applicants lack a clear and reasonable link between their request and their disability or medically related need, officials added.
“[I]ndividuals with a verifiable medical need can receive specialized meals that comport with their dietary restrictions wherever reasonable and possible,” a DHS spokesperson said in a statement. “If a need for a medically-necessary diet cannot be met by DHS, the client will be provided a unit with a kitchen.”
Isabel said she asked multiple times to be assigned to a unit with a kitchen so that she could more easily feed her daughter food she can swallow. However, after months of trying and despite the advice and advocacy of organizations that help the homeless, the city denied it.
“I have friends who have been placed in shelters with kitchens,” Isabel, 52, explained. “But I submitted letters from [my daughter’s] doctor, and they told me it wasn’t enough. It’s impossible.”
Others have had somewhat better luck. Luis, his wife, and their teenage son entered the shelter system in 2024. Luis, who asked that his last name not be shared for fear of immigration consequences, uses a wheelchair. He also has diabetes, high blood pressure, is overweight, and takes cholesterol medication.
While he stayed at shelters like the Watson and the ROW NYC—two commercial hotels used as Humanitarian Emergency Response and Relief Centers for migrants, which the city has since shuttered—he sold bottled water and refreshments to earn some cash.
With that money, combined with what his wife earned, they bought their own food or cooked it secretly in the restroom with a small electric cooking pot, like many others did, he admitted.
Repeatedly, he said, he asked for a room with a kitchen. His request was granted in the last few days of January at one of the few hotel shelters with compact kitchenettes in Long Island City, Queens.
“We have a small kitchen, a microwave, and a refrigerator,” Luis said, adding that he had initially planned to make lomo saltado, a traditional Peruvian dish, the first time they cooked in it, but for practical reasons, they opted for chicken instead.
“The hotel is very comfortable, and we have a kitchen,” said Luis. “We can’t complain anymore.”
Request for a refrigerator
María and Diego have two babies, a three-month-old and a 20-month-old. The older baby has too much calcium in her blood because of a condition called hypercalcemia. It also causes constipation—which her parents say leaves her easily irritated—and has made it difficult for her to gain weight.
The couple said that during their first month’s stay at a shelter hotel in Jamaica, Queens, their daughter lost weight. “Our main concern was her nutrition—that she would grow and be strong. It was very frustrating for us,” Diego said.
To ward off the loss of appetite caused by hypercalcemia, they started giving her food they had made themselves late at night or in the early morning, when they cooked quietly in the shelter using electric pots and pans. “These days she eats really asleep—and it’s kind of amazing—but that’s just how she eats,” María, who asked that her last name be withheld, said.
received after seeking a reasonable accommodation
request for their toddler daughter’s health needs.
In the hotel where the family currently lives in Jamaica, Queens, they described difficulties bringing in food, getting hot water and even more than one pack of bottled water per family, after the hotel posted signage banning it.
Although DHS says it has recently allowed families in shelters to bring food for same-day consumption and store non-perishable food that doesn’t need to be kept cold in their hotel rooms, the couple disputes that claim. “They’re really strict,” said Diego. “They were always coming by, checking our room, and taking my daughter’s fruit away.”
After their request for a kitchen was declined, advocates working with the family opted to ask for a refrigerator instead.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless’ FOIL data, DHS approved only 15 percent (91 out of the 590) of requests for refrigerators during the nearly three-year period advocates examined.
María and Diego’s request was granted a few weeks ago. But when the appliance arrived, it was a 5-by-5-inch mini cooler—too small to hold anything besides small canned drinks.
“Literally, it’s a toy. My daughter started playing with it,” María said.
When asked the size, DHS said they don’t comment on particular cases, but stated they can accommodate specialized meals and sites can also offer access to a refrigerator to store additional items.
What’s on the menu
For facilities that don’t have cooking amenities for clients, officials explained, a shelter contractor offers three meals per day: breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Although DHS says that these meals meet city standards, such as being low in salt and fat, and high in fruits and vegetables, advocates and users contend otherwise.
“The food quality is not good at most places,” said Jamie Powlovich, a senior manager for the Coalition for the Homeless, one of the organizations that not only advocates for people’s specific cases but also visits city shelters.
“We’re regularly seeing or being sent pictures of food that I think most people would think does not look appetizing bordering on edible. We’re also hearing and seeing food that is not heated up all the way so it’s still semi frozen, or food that looks or smells like it’s spoiled so that it hasn’t been kept appropriately,” Powlovich added. “We question whether or not it meets the nutritional requirements set forth in the New York City Food Policy standards around the size and calorie right amount that certain food should have, depending on if it’s for an adult or child.”
Shelter food itself was the subject of a hearing at the City Council last year, when DHS officials stated they’d receive 1,479 complaints about food and meals in 2024. (City Limits requested more recent data from DHS, but the department did not provide it.)
by the Coalition for the Homeless and Legal Aid Society during
a City Council hearing last year on shelter food.
Advocates from the Coalition for the Homeless, Legal Aid Society, and New York Legal Assistance Group, three groups representing people in shelters, said that one of the most frequent complaints they receive from residents is about quality, portion sizes, and the lack of adequate meals for children, on top of the hard-to-get kitchen requests.
DHS explained that while many shelters hire their own vendors, the department gives guidance and training to comply with food standard rules. According to the Coalition’s FOIL data, reasonable accommodation requests related to medical dietary needs have one of the highest DHS approval rates, at 66 percent.
After their reviews, in many cases, vendors meet the specific medical needs of the people they serve, DHS said, but residents simply didn’t like the meals. The agency said it is working to improve meal satisfaction through more culturally diverse menus, condiments, and shelf-stable and child-friendly foods.
City Councilmember Julie Won introduced a bill last month requiring the city to prepare reports on the quality of shelter food and how much of it is actually eaten—an effort to root out waste, after reports in 2023 that one emergency shelter provider tossed 70,000 uneaten meals over a 20-day period, to the cost of roughly $776,000, the New York Times reported at the time.
While Isabel and her daughter still don’t have access to a kitchen, her request for more medically appropriate food has at least partially paid off: Three weeks ago, after months of the Coalition for the Homeless intervening, the shelter began providing her with smoothies for her daughter.
“It seems to contain spinach and vegetables,” Isabel said. “And she likes it.”
To reach the reporter behind this story, contact [email protected]. To reach the editor, contact [email protected]
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