Third Sector Recon | Independent Nonprofit Diligence

CURRENT STUDY · TSR-TBS-001 · NOVEMBER 2026

The Thin Balance Sheet

A comparative study of five New York City homeless services providers operating under Department of Homeless Services contracts, drawn from their filed Forms 990. The measures most often quoted to donors rank these organizations almost at random. Read against the balance sheet, the same returns show which of them can carry the City's payment lag and which cannot.

Read the study Download the paper (PDF)

homeless services providers under City contract

$634.3M

combined revenue in the latest filed year

4 of 5

ran a deficit in the year reported

86.1%+

of revenue from government at every one of the five, as high as 99.7%

Studies and papers

TSR-TBS-001 · November 2026

The Thin Balance Sheet

Five New York City homeless services providers, read from their filed Forms 990.

Further studies will be posted here as they are released.

Method

Every figure is read directly from documents organizations file in public, chiefly the Form 990, and is cited to the return it came from, so any reader can check it. Judgment is labeled as opinion and analysis and kept apart from statements of fact.

Independence

Third Sector Recon takes no money from the organizations it covers, or from their funders, vendors or consultants. Its work is unsigned as a matter of policy, so each finding stands on the public record rather than on who assembled it.

Responses and corrections

Any organization discussed is invited to respond, and any response is published in full and without editing. Errors are corrected at the head of the document, and the correction remains there permanently.