In the University Heights section of the Bronx, a 200-bed shelter for homeless men overlooking the Harlem River opened earlier this year.

There’s a lounge on every floor, an outdoor patio, and a kitchen where meals are cooked for those who want them.

“It's mellow,” said resident Jarrod Shellock, 46, a disabled veteran who served in Desert Storm, Somalia and Afghanistan. “There's no fighting, and there’s no stealing.”

The University Heights shelter is one of the new high-quality facilities that Mayor Bill de Blasio promised to open in February of 2017, when he announced an overhaul of the city's approach to homelessness. The expanded capacity would not only accommodate New York's growing homeless population, but it would also allow the Department of Homeless Services to phase out the private apartments—called clusters—and hotels where the city had been putting clients, but which were often dilapidated and unsafe.

The mayor set out a timeline for himself during that speech: he said 90 shelters would open over five years at a rate of around 20 shelters each year. That means that by now, more than a year and a half later, more than 30 should be in operation. Instead, just 17 of them — a little over half — have opened.

In an interview with WNYC, Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks defended the progress the city has made, and said the city will meet its goal of opening 90 shelters by 2022 —even though it will mean doubling the city's pace so far.

“We have a lot more to do to address this problem that's been decades in the making,” he said. “But some of the metrics that we look at are moving in the right direction.”

Opening new homeless shelters is a difficult task under any circumstance: they have met with resistance in neighborhoods from Crown Heights, Brooklyn; to midtown Manhattan; to Ozone Park, Queens.

But some homeless experts, like Christine Quinn, the former City Council speaker who now runs Women in Need, argue the system for creating the new shelters is odd, if not inefficient.

That's because the city does not build the shelters directly. Rather, private developers do; shelter operators like hers then lease the buildings from those developers; and the city pays the shelter operator. Quinn said that if the Department of Homeless Services was also actively looking for sites, more shelters would be built, and they would be built faster.

“If we keep building shelters the way we're building shelters," she said, "and if the city's involvement stays at the level it presently is, I don't know why the process would speed up."

The mayor’s February 2017 homeless plan also called spreading out shelters to different communities, instead of concentrating them in certain low-income neighborhoods.

“If a community board has 50 people in shelter system, we want them to have some kind of capacity like that,” de Blasio said at the time. “If they have thousands, we want them to have capacity for the people from their neighborhood.”

City officials say they’ve made some progress on this front. Social Services Commissioner Steven Banks said shelters have been opened in neighborhoods that didn’t have any before, such as Far Rockaway.

But data from the Department of Homeless Services shows a different story: the same imbalances present a year and a half ago persist to this day. Most of the neighborhoods that should be hosting significantly more homeless people—community districts covering Staten Island’s North Shore, Ditmas Park and Flatbush in Brooklyn, and Glendale and Maspeth in Queens—are not. Community districts that include midtown Manhattan, East Elmhurst and Jackson Heights in Queens, and Sunset Park in Brooklyn, are still doing more than their fair share.

Even when the administration sets out to correct some of the imbalances, sometimes things don’t change. Take Community District 6 in the central Bronx as an example. When de Blasio announced his plan, a lot of homeless people lived in cluster sites this area, which is to the west of the Bronx Zoo, according to data from the Department of Homeless Services.

The city closed a lot of those clusters — which would theoretically decrease the homeless population in the area. But, at the same time, the city also opened three new shelters there. Now, the data for Community District 6 looks exactly the way it did when the mayor announced the new plan: It has at least 1,300 people in shelters who are not from there.

City Councilman Ritchie Torres, who represents the area, applauds how the city closed cluster sites in his district. And while he doesn’t oppose shelters outright, he does believe that the area is doing more than its fair share of housing the homeless.

“There ought to be a more equitable distribution of shelters throughout the city,” he said.

Lylla Younes contributed data analysis.