Whether riding the subway or walking along a busy stretch of sidewalk, New Yorkers are likely to cross paths with people who have nowhere to sleep. Some of those people might also need mental health or substance abuse treatment.

Those with unmet needs sometimes get stuck in a cycle of homelessness, hospitalization and jail. The Manhattan district attorney’s office is now funding a new program, called Neighborhood Navigators, to connect homeless people with services before they interact with the criminal justice system.

The program is partly aimed at preventing crimes, Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg said. But he said only a small share of encounters ever escalate to that level. Neighborhood Navigators also intends to help people who aren’t violent — and whom many New Yorkers may cross the street to avoid.

“What the navigators do is they cross the street to that conduct,” Bragg said in a recent interview. “They engage with people in distress and they build relationships, and ultimately connect them to services.”

The DA’s office has committed $6 million to the nonprofit The Bridge, which is hiring and training navigators to work in four Manhattan areas with high rates of chronic homelessness, mental illness and addiction: Chinatown/Lower East Side, Central/East Harlem, Midtown West/Hell’s Kitchen/Chelsea, and Washington Heights. The workers have already provided resources to more than 400 people since the program launched earlier this year, and more than 80 people are currently enrolled in ongoing service coordination, according to Bragg’s office. The program is slated to run for at least the next three-and-a-half years.

“I think sometimes you just need that person to build that bridge between the service and the individual,” said Neighborhood Navigator Zhi Lu, on a scorching hot day in August.

He was sitting on a bench in Sara D. Roosevelt Park, a long stretch of grass, sport courts and jungle gyms connecting half-a-dozen neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan. It’s become a popular gathering place for homeless New Yorkers. A couple of high-profile acts of violence, both by and against homeless New Yorkers, have also recently happened in this area.

“My hope is my clients can get the sober network or the peer services, or get them connected to mental health, so that they can live fully and well without me,” Lu said. “My job is to get them there.”

The park is just feet from an apartment building where a homeless man with serious mental illness snuck into an apartment and stabbed the resident to death in 2022. It’s also about half a mile from where a homeless man was choked to death on the subway last year.

Lu said he knows the benches where his clients sleep and the delis where they panhandle. He’s memorized their whereabouts and routines. Otherwise, it can be nearly impossible to track them down, because they don’t always have an address or a cellphone.

Lu spends his days walking around areas of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, where he often encounters people who need housing, mental health care and substance abuse treatment. He approaches them and asks how they’re doing. He offers them a snack, a water bottle and a bag with toiletries. He asks what they need. And if they’re open to it, he makes a plan to connect them with services.

‘Whenever you’re ready’

Many Neighborhood Navigators have their own personal connections to the neighborhoods where they work, or even their own experiences with homelessness, mental illness or substance abuse.

“It’s definitely a step in the right direction,” said Philip Yanos, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a psychologist who provides intensive treatment to people on the street.

Yanos said he was glad prosecutors are investing in a program aimed at connecting people with resources before they end up in court. But he said this type of work can have its limitations if there aren’t enough services to offer people. For example, he said, there just isn’t enough housing in the city. That can make it difficult for him to treat his homeless patients, who are stuck in unstable living conditions.

“There are cases where these navigators are going to encounter that as well,” said Yanos. “But I bet there’s a subset of people that they will be able to assist.”

In Washington Heights, Neighborhood Navigator Alexandra Alma has already gotten a sense of the incremental nature of this work. For weeks, she’s been trying to help a man named Juanito go to the doctor and to the Mexican embassy for some paperwork. Alma said she has also been trying to get him into detox services for alcoholism.

“I’m thinking about whether we’re going to do that,” Juanito told her in Spanish while sitting on a bench on Broadway Avenue, near the George Washington Bridge, one afternoon in late August. “I have to think about it.”

But Alma said in an interview that Juanito often forgets about their appointments or has already started drinking by the time they meet up.

“It doesn’t mean that I will not speak to him,” she said. “I just tell him, ‘Whenever you’re ready, or whenever you get your situation settled, then you call me, contact me.’”

Alma knows firsthand how long it can take to change your circumstances. She’s from this neighborhood and said she grew up in shelters. She and her mom moved into an apartment during the pandemic and now split the rent.

“I use it as a motivation tool,” said Alma. “When I see that they’re getting discouraged within their own process, when an application goes through and it’s not successful, or when they’re just not ready to see a goal or establish a goal, I say, ‘Hey, look, I didn’t have a goal either. And this is what happened to me, and this is how it ended up.’”