Social Impact

Giving to Padlest does one thing: it moves a family out of a shelter and into a home that already exists. Tell us you'd like to help and we'll be in touch.

A year of childhood, spent waiting for a door that already exists

Thousands of families with children have nowhere of their own to sleep tonight. They are not waiting for apartments to be built. Tens of thousands are already standing empty, and what keeps them shut is the cost of reopening them.

372Days the average family with children spends in the shelter system. More than a year, in a childhood that only has eighteen of them.

1Apartment, reopened, is what ends that for one family. Permanently, in their own home, with their own key, and with us still there afterward.

Giving to Padlest does one thing. It turns a locked apartment into somebody's address.

Average nightly shelter census and average length of stay for families with children, New York City Mayor's Management Report, Department of Homeless Services chapter, fiscal year 2025. Vacant stabilized unit count via the NYC Comptroller.

18,767families with children in a city shelter on an average nightNYC Mayor's Management Report, DHS, FY2025

194,531people used the city shelter system in FY2025, the most in its historyNYS Comptroller

57,421rent stabilized apartments standing empty while they waitNYC Comptroller

And it costs the city less than the shelter did

This is not the reason to give. It is what makes giving compound: the same family, housed instead of sheltered, is also a cost the city stops carrying, every year the tenancy holds.

$68,600a year, what the city spends to keep one family in a regular shelter placementWIN via Crain's New York Business, annualized

$26,300a year, the same family in a voucher backed home, and the home is permanentWIN via Crain's New York Business, annualized

$42,300the difference, per family, for every year they stay housed rather than shelteredThe gap between the two figures beside it

There is a second layer under that one. New York's own supportive housing evaluations found roughly $10,100 more per person per year in avoided health, psychiatric, and corrections costs where the apartment came with real support alongside it. That is the bar the fourth step of our model is built to meet, and none of it counts what a year in a shelter costs a child's schooling or a parent's health. Nobody bills the city for that.

Shelter and voucher rates are the regular family shelter rate, not the hotel rate, which is higher and covers a different population. Supportive housing figure from the NY/NY III Supportive Housing Evaluation via NYC DOHMH, which measured established supportive housing programs rather than this one. Padlest has not yet placed a family, and none of these figures are a result it has produced.