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The New York Times ran a three-part series of investigative articles by reporter Clifford Levy from April 28 to April 30 on 26 of New York City's largest adult homes, which shelter about 5,000 consumers with mental illness. They found horrible conditions for consumers where unqualified, untrained and underpaid workers looked after them.

Thanks to the downsizing of New York State hospitals, or deinstitutionalization, there are about 15,000 consumers living in more than 100 adult homes across the state. Adult homes are privately-run, usually for-profit residences conceived as alternatives to the misery of state hospitals and are intended to integrate consumers into the mainstream community and to provide better care. Instead, adult homes are often places of misery and neglect, just like the psychiatric institutions before them. The state has not kept track of how broken the homes are.

The Times found that at the 26 largest adult homes in New York City investigated, 946 residents had died from 1995 through 2001, including 326 people who were younger than 60 and including 126 who were in their 20's, 30's and 40's. The Times found that at Seaport, which was called one of NYC's worst adult home, one resident died every month from 1995 through 2001, with 58 being the average age of death. According to one Times article: "Some residents died roasting in their rooms during heat waves. Others threw themselves from rooftops, making up some of at least 14 suicides in that seven-year period. Still more, lacking the most basic care, succumbed to routinely treatable ailments, from burst appendix to seizures." The state has records for only three of the 946 deaths.

When New York City Voices asked Clifford Levy what he was trying to accomplish with his series of articles, he responded: "We were hoping through our series, Broken Homes, to illuminate for readers a universe that has gone largely unnoticed. We realized that the public knew about deinstitutionalization because of the increase in mentally ill homeless people, but what had gone largely unexamined was that a whole class of mentally ill people had ended up in adult homes, with little supervision by the homes or oversight by the state. The series appears to have struck a chord. I have received more than 200 phone calls, emails and letters from readers. In addition, federal prosecutors in two offices have opened up investigations into the system."

Running most adult homes as for-profit corporations, adult home operators, who have no mental health expertise, collect consumers' monthly disability checks for rent and outside providers pay fees to the home for the opportunity to treat residents. But operators and providers, who have financial arrangements between them, are greedy for more government money and are thus willing to cheat the system. At dozens of homes, residents are brought before a flock of outside providers for treatment-from unnecessary prostate and eye surgeries to allergy shots-that seem more intended to generate revenue from government programs than to promote residents' good health. Consumers are being coerced to sign consent forms under threat of being rehospitalized or withholding their spending money. According to The Times federal and state agencies wind up spending $40,000 annually on each resident. For the 15,000 consumers in adult homes in New York State, that adds up to $600 million a year. Crooked operators and providers are getting away with murder at the expense of consumers who still do not receive the appropriate psychiatric and medical care they need.

Outrageous conditions still exist in many of NYC's adult homes, yet the state is unwilling to shut them down because few alternative exist to place large numbers of dislodged consumers.