To tackle homelessness, the de Blasio administration has been providing rental assistance to homeless families trying to get them out of shelter and into permanent housing. They are now planning to do the same thing for single adults. NY1's Courtney Gross filed this report.

Decades ago, these two fought in the marines. Now, they sleep at a homeless shelter on the East Side of Manhattan. 

"We're still suffering here, because when it hits 90 outside it's 120 inside," one of the veterans says.

"They don't treat us with the dignity and respect—that we deserve," says the other.

It's homeless single adults like these veterans who are a new focus of the de Blasio administration. 

"This is a new rental assistance program designed to prevent women and men from becoming homeless in the first place," says Steven Banks of the Human Resources Administration.

City Hall is rolling out its first new rental subsidy for homeless single adults, targeting people who have lost their homes because of eviction, people who are veterans, are victims of domestic violence or former inmates. 

It's a $10 million program aiming to help 1,000 people. 

"The facts are we inherited a mess. The prior adminsitration eliminated rental assistance. And over the course of the last year, the current adminsitration has been implementing targeted programs to get away from the past when there was no assistance at all," Banks says.

Meanwhile, the single adult population has continued to climb, growing from about 9,000 in 2012 to more than 12,000 people last week. 

This new program will give adults a subsidy to find an apartment to rent for a little more than $1,200 dollars a month. 

"It will be a struggle to find units, but it is possible to identify," says Lindsey Davis of Coalition for the Homeless.

This new subsidy is part of a larger strategy by the de Blasio administration to try to tackle the rising number of homeless people here in New York. It's something the mayor says is at the top of his agenda. 

He took to the editorial pages of the Daily News on Sunday, saying his adminsitration has invested $1 billion to tackle homelessness. 

He cited a similar statistic when asked about homelessness during a Twitter chat on Monday.

At the shelter we visited, though, it's unclear if that message is resonating. 

"I doubt the city is trying to do anything for veterans cause everyday they say that and we're still here sweating, looking for hope," says one of the former marines.