Adelphi Street shelter closing as Code Blue build begins

The only year-round, low-barrier homeless shelter in Saratoga Springs, on Adelphi Street, is set to close at the end of October, and Shelters of Saratoga plans to break ground on Thursday, Oct. 1, on the county’s first permanent Code Blue shelter on Ballston Avenue. Both dates were laid out at a public panel on homelessness held Thursday, Sept. 24, at the Saratoga Springs Public Library, according to The Daily Gazette.

The two shelters do different jobs, and the gap between them is the story. The Adelphi Street shelter is open every day of the year and asks little of the people who stay there. The Code Blue shelter opens only on freezing nights from November through April, and the new building on Ballston Avenue is not expected to open until October 2027, WAMC reported in April.

What changes and when

Here is the timeline as officials and the shelter operators have described it.

• Oct. 1, 2026: Shelters of Saratoga is scheduled to break ground on the permanent Code Blue shelter on Ballston Avenue, across the street from the Market 32 supermarket, according to the Gazette.
• End of October 2026: the Adelphi Street shelter, run by RISE Housing and Support Services, closes. The city restored funding for 2026 but only for 10 months, the Gazette reported.
• November 2026 through April 2027: Code Blue runs again at a temporary site. CBS6 reported in April that the temporary location would be used for the coming winter.
• October 2027: the new Code Blue building is expected to be ready, according to WAMC.

The Adelphi Street shelter

The Adelphi Street shelter opened in 2023 as a stopgap while a city task force studied whether Saratoga Springs needed a permanent year-round, low-barrier shelter, according to the website of Rise Housing and Support Services. Low-barrier means guests are not required to be sober, pass a background check or give up a pet. The shelter at 4 Adelphi Street provides three meals a day, showers and laundry, and RISE says care management is offered but not required.

WAMC reported that the shelter houses upwards of 30 people year-round. RISE executive director Sybil Newell told the station that before the shelter opened, as many as 20 people were living in a downtown parking garage in 2023, and that the city’s own 2023 homelessness task force concluded a year-round low-barrier shelter was needed. Mayor John Safford told WAMC in April he did not expect encampments to return downtown after the Adelphi Street shelter closes.

The Code Blue building on Ballston Avenue

New York has required counties since 2016 to shelter homeless people when the temperature drops below 32 degrees, according to Saratoga TODAY. Saratoga Springs started its own Code Blue program in 2013 after Nancy Pitts, a city resident, died in freezing weather. For more than a decade the program has moved from one temporary building to the next.

The Saratoga County Board of Supervisors approved the permanent site on April 21, 2026. The facility planned by Shelters of Saratoga is described this way, according to Saratoga TODAY.

• A 25,600-square-foot building with a common room, office space, a commercial kitchen and a dining hall.
• 75 beds, with room for 43 more in an emergency.
• Built and operated by Shelters of Saratoga, and open in winter and on any night the temperature falls below freezing.

The county secured the land in January 2025. Because the law bars the county from leasing directly to Shelters of Saratoga, according to board chair Anthony Morelli, the Saratoga County Capital Resource Corporation, a not-for-profit development company, holds a ground lease and subleases the site to the shelter operator, the Gazette reported. Stephanie Romeo became Shelters of Saratoga’s executive director in March. The site sits across Ballston Avenue from Market 32 at 115 Ballston Avenue.

What the numbers show

Lindsey Gonzalez, co-chair of the Saratoga-North Country Continuum of Care, gave the panel of about 50 people the most recent counts, as reported by the Gazette. In January 2026 there were 348 people in emergency shelters in Saratoga County, nine in temporary housing and none sleeping outside. A year earlier the emergency shelter count was 196. Gonzalez credited the zero unsheltered count to having both the Adelphi Street and Code Blue shelters open.

From January through August 2026, the continuum counted 130 young people age 24 or younger who were homeless on their own, 190 who were homeless with adults and 14 who were heading a household. The continuum also counted 406 people age 55 and older, and Gonzalez said older adults on fixed incomes are now the fastest-growing group.

City officials push back on costs

Public Safety Commissioner Tim Coll called the numbers concerning and said the Ballston Avenue shelter will add strain on the Saratoga Springs Police Department. He said one person has been charged 67 times by city police since January 2024 and another 41 times, and described the load on officers as “real and it’s just not sustainable,” according to the Gazette. Coll also said neighbors of both shelter sites are angry. He did not provide data for his statement that many people using the shelters come from outside the city.

City supervisors raised the same money question when the county approved the site. Supervisor Sarah Burger said there were 264 emergency calls to the current Code Blue shelter in 2025, according to Saratoga TODAY, and she told CBS6 she wants the county to pay the city a host community fee. Supervisor Minita Sanghvi has asked for an agreement to share police, fire and EMS costs.

Gonzalez ended the panel with her own list: inclusionary zoning, a year-round low-barrier shelter backed by the county, more permanent supportive housing and use of federal Community Development Block Grant money. Our read: the ground-breaking settles where Code Blue will live, but nobody on the panel had a plan for the roughly 30 people now staying on Adelphi Street between November and the time a permanent year-round option exists. Panel host Finding Common Ground, a community group founded by members of Indivisible ADK/Saratoga, held the discussion at the Saratoga Springs Public Library on Henry Street.

We will report on the ground-breaking and on where Code Blue will operate this winter once Shelters of Saratoga confirms the temporary site.

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