A month after New York City banned teenagers and young adults from sleeping through the night at drop-in centers for homeless and runaway youth, a high-ranking official in Gov. Kathy Hochul administration was getting frustrated.

In a Feb. 8 email, Nina Aledort, a deputy commissioner at the New York State Office of Children and Family Services, asked a high-ranking city official why Mayor Eric Adams’s administration was falsely saying that the order came from the state.

“As you know, it did not. I hope that staff can be clear about that in the future,” she wrote.

In an emailed response, Anthony Ng, the acting chief of staff for the city’s Department of Youth and Community Development, acknowledged the policy decision was the city’s alone.

We have “been clear that this guidance came from D.Y.C.D., and we own that,” he wrote.

The emails, released by the state in accordance with its Freedom of Information Law, point to widespread frustration, including from the state, over the Adams administration’s efforts to ban sleeping at the centers.

The emails also highlight the ongoing mystery surrounding what prompted the ban in the first place.

“To this day we don’t know,” said Jamie Powlovich, executive director of the Coalition for Homeless Youth.

New York City’s five 24-7 drop-in centers, opened over the course of the last five years, are designed to serve as a refuge for teenagers and young adults who have nowhere else to turn.

While they connect youth with more permanent housing, they have also provided cots or trundle beds, so that when a teenager in crisis turns up at 3 a.m., or when there is a shortage of other options, they have somewhere safe to sleep.

The cots do not appear to have been a secret. The city conducts monthly inspections of the centers.

State and city officials have sought an explanation for the directive from the Adams administration for months now, to no avail. So too have the five organizations that run the overnight drop-in centers, one in each borough.

A new commissioner, Keith Howard, a longtime Transportation Department official with limited subject matter experience, took over the city’s youth department last June. In a statement on Monday, Amaris Cockfield, a spokeswoman for the mayor, said the ban was about safety, but declined to say what catalyzed the city’s policy shift.

Ms. Cockfield denied the city ever sought to pin blame on state regulations, but cited those rules as a factor in the city’s deliberations.

“Shelters are required to adhere to rigorous safety standards for residential programs set forth by New York State law, and these centers do not have this type of license, nor are they in buildings that currently meet New York City building code requirements for shelters,” Ms. Cockfield said.

The state licenses residential shelters, which provide food, clothing, counseling, laundry and showers, and give homeless youth a safe space that caters to people their age. Since drop-in centers are not licensed as residential shelters, they have existed for years in legally nebulous territory — a necessary concession to reality, advocates say.

Citywide, there are only 60 shelter beds dedicated to young adults between the ages of 21 and 24. Fifteen of those beds are temporarily out of service, and the rest are oversubscribed, Ms. Powlovich said.

On the afternoon of Jan. 13, Samantha Dawkins, an official with the Department of Youth & Community Development, emailed the drop-in centers with the news.

“Effective immediately, providers are required to discontinue the practice of allowing youth and young adults to sleep overnight,” she wrote, in a directive first reported by the news site The City. “This includes removing cots or furniture designed for sleeping, and communicating to participants that the priority is to place them into a more stable housing situation.”

Ms. Powlovich, whose organization represents the service providers, sought an emergency meeting for the following week. The city declined, she said. It was only after The City article in February that city officials finally agreed to meet.

Initially, city officials sought to deflect blame.

When Althea Stevens, the New York City councilwoman who chairs the Committee on Youth Services, heard about the directive, she was “seriously furious,” she said. “Young people will still show up there. So is the solution that they sleep on the floor?”

She reached out to an administration official to find out more.

“It was like, ‘oh it’s a state mandate, this came from them,’” Ms. Stevens recalled the official saying. (She declined to give the official’s name.)

One of the five sites, the Ali Forney center in Manhattan, has publicly vowed to defy the order.

At a City Council hearing on Monday, Josh Bravo, 21, said he found himself sleeping every now and again at Ali Forney after escaping an abusive home in New Jersey. Now an aspiring actor, Mr. Bravo said that without the option to sometimes sleep at Ali Forney, he “probably would have been dead in the streets.”

At the hearing, city officials said the sleeping ban does not preclude resting, but that they were still working on an “F.A.Q.” to define the distinction between “rest” and “sleep.”

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