“PATH was built to manage crisis, not prevent it. Its role is to decide who qualifies for shelter, not who needs housing. As a result, families are forced to fall far enough to be deemed eligible.”

New York City’s shelter intake system for families with children—known as Prevention Assistance and Temporary Housing, or PATH—is the single point of entry for parents seeking emergency shelter when they have nowhere else to go.

Each year, thousands of infants in New York City are born into homelessness or enter the shelter system within their first year of life. According to the city’s own Department of Homeless Services, once a family reaches PATH, the crisis has already begun. By the time parents arrive there with babies in their arms, instability has hardened into trauma.

PATH is not concerned with housing—it is an intake system designed to determine shelter eligibility, but eligibility only comes after families have fallen far enough to prove crisis. PATH is a system that waits for collapse. That is not a safety net, and it does not safeguard the most vulnerable among us.

Babies do not experience instability the way adults do. Stress, displacement, and uncertainty in the earliest stages of life are not easily undone. So what is shaping these children—their nature, or the environment we place them in? When intervention comes only after eviction or displacement—after a collapse, a breakdown in the family—the damage has already been done. Timing matters. Prevention matters.

We repeat slogans like “children are the future” and “it takes a village,” yet our systems respond only after families are in crisis. How can children imagine a future without a stable home? And where is the village when parents must enter shelter intake—after collapse—just to qualify for help?

PATH was built to manage crisis, not prevent it. Its role is to decide who qualifies for shelter, not who needs housing. As a result, families are forced to fall far enough to be deemed eligible.

PATH could become a more direct road to housing by prioritizing pathways like Pathway Home and, as an upstream measure, partnering with housing initiatives such as Anthos Homes to support immediate housing stabilization and placement—especially for families with infants.

James Baldwin once said we must go the way our blood beats. For too many babies born into shelter, that beat is survival. When instability becomes normal, crisis becomes the body’s language. PATH should be the road to housing, not a test of endurance. Babies deserve a life they can live—not one they must survive.

Rhonda Jackson is a lived-experience community engagement consultant and a leader with the Family Action Board of the Family Homelessness Coalition.*

*Editor’s note: Citizens’ Committee for Children of New York, a member of the Family Homelessness Coalition, is among City Limits’ funders.

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