Connecting housing vouchers with New Yorkers in need of homes

As of this past spring, nearly 108,464 people had slept in New York City shelters – yet experts have warned that actual numbers may be much higher. While landlord incentives for CityFHEPS vouchers have recently been threatened, advocates at Anthos|Home are making use of this complicated resource to place people into permanent homes.  

While housing vouchers and rental subsidies have existed in some form since the 1970s, according to Anthos|Home, an estimated 40% of vouchers continue to go unused, with an additional 50% of potential users being unable to use them – due to system mistrust and lack of eligible units. While New York City housing laws require landlords to honor vouchers, many tenants still face housing discrimination, compounded with difficulty navigating the system.

Anthos|Home hopes to fill this gap by matching voucher holders with eligible properties, while smoothing over technical creases along the way. Having identified over 450 eligible units throughout all five boroughs, the nonprofit currently has over 150 vacant units in its portfolio, adding anywhere from 30 to 40 new units per month. 

Led by Laura Lazarus, former deputy commissioner of New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, Anthos|Home hopes to house nearly 500 households with vouchers by the end of the summer. New York Nonprofit Media spoke to Lazarus about the nonprofit’s flexible housing model and the wraparound services it offers to both landlords and tenants. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

It seems like one of Anthos|Home's primary goals is to broker a sense of trust between applicants and landlords. What other relationship-building services do you offer? 

So we're really a matchmaking service where we help landlords who have available units and help tenants who want to move in. We provide a lot of support to both of them. We have a flexible fund, where every voucher unit needs to meet inspection requirements. If a unit might need some minor repairs, we can help support a landlord in getting those done. We help with all of the paperwork processing for both the landlord and the tenant. If there are any problems along the way, we can be the ones to contact the government agency and sort that out. We also provide the tenant with essential furniture, and we can advocate on behalf of the tenant, so it's really wraparound support that we offer from the very beginning until a tenant has been there for at least a year. We make sure that they recertify their voucher and renew their lease. We have a 24/7 hotline for both landlords and tenants to help resolve any issues that come up. 

Why is it necessary to offer more hand-holding for under-resourced tenants? 

I think for anybody, when you move into a new apartment, there are always things to resolve. If you've been in a shelter for a year to two, three years, you probably don’t have financial resources. Maintaining a rental voucher requires certain things – tenants have to have certain income requirements and they typically have to be enrolled in public assistance. There are just more requirements that are imposed on people with a voucher, and we’re making sure that they meet all of those. 

So I understand that your flexible housing model was based on a nonprofit housing provider in California? Why did you feel like this model was best suited for New York? 

So our model is based off of a group in California called Brilliant Corners. They've been operating for more than 10 years and helped more than 16,000 people move into permanent housing. We thought that they had a great track record, and we really liked all the support they provide to landlords and tenants. Like us, they have a reserve of units. We go out and we find units that meet voucher requirements throughout all five boroughs, based on the needs of the tenants. By having this availability, as soon as somebody is referred to us, we can show them a couple of units, set that up, and then ideally, they pick that unit. So it's this matchmaking element that we thought was really great. The other part of their model that we really liked is the flexible funding pool, which is about filling in the gaps between the government and the private sector to move through this process smoothly. The third element is the year-long support for tenants and landlords, because we hope to continue multi-year relationships. We’re focused on helping people move from shelter into permanent housing quickly and efficiently. 

How do you select the right tenant for each property? 

We have a contract with the New York City Administration for Children's Services. Through them, we receive referrals of young adults aging out of foster care, as well as families who are involved with child welfare, in shelters, of which there are many. One of our private foundation funders has also asked that we help people with high health needs, chronic illnesses, who can live independently in the community. We have partnerships with a number of nonprofit shelter providers. One requirement is that the families and individuals have to have a voucher issued by either New York City or the federal government or from the state. We can't help them get a voucher.

It hasn’t been long since you started Anthos|Home in 2022. What was the biggest obstacle you had to overcome to get the organization off the ground? 

Early on, it was really hard with landlords and property owners. They didn't know who we were. They didn't actually believe we would step in to help them. They were very skeptical. You can imagine what the real estate industry is like. So it took a long time. It took a number of months for the Rent Stabilization Association of New York City to allow us to present to their members, because they really needed to understand who we were, our legal agreements and what we were offering. Now it's about building off that infrastructure and identifying more partners, more supporters, and also making ourselves more efficient, so that we can do things in a more streamlined way. 

So you've looked at affordability from a lot of different angles – from being a lawyer to being on the financial side of affordable housing to then serving as deputy commissioner of New York City's Department of Housing Preservation and Development. If you could sum up one key takeaway from those spaces that inform your work now, what would they be? 

Most of my career has been about addressing the need for affordable housing in one way or another, and I am very aware, based on that work, how challenging it is to create, build, and preserve affordable housing, and how much collaboration is required to make that happen. And really creativity, right? I think the best thing that HPD does for New York City is that they are so creative in their solutions in a place where there's limited funding and limited land. I love all of the ideas that they are able to bring to the table. When I was there, having that experience of thinking outside of the box is what I'm bringing to this venture here at Anthos|home. And all of us are about, how do we fill in these gaps? How do we help support the government to take advantage of this incredible resource we offer people and make it work for everybody, for nonprofits, and of course, for the families who desperately need to be housed? 

What motivated you to serve the affordable housing space? 

I think that I had always known, when I was leaving college, that I was interested in doing something on the social service side, I just didn't know what. It was just fortuitous that I met someone who was working at HPD and they were hiring. It was kind of random that I got that job, but I had actually written my senior thesis in college on housing in Jersey City. I had also kind of picked that topic randomly, but then it just continued. At law school, I worked at HPD and I met this wonderful woman, Florence Roisman, who’s a law professor at Indiana University. She was very focused on fair housing and she worked at the National Housing Law Project and put me in contact with my next job. So in some ways, it was just a set of relationships that continued to introduce me to opportunities. Housing is so fundamental. You know, Anthos is Greek for blossom, and it's taken from a book written by Matthew Desmond, called “Evicted.” In his epilogue, he talks about how a family or an individual really cannot blossom until they have a home. You really can't focus on your employment, the educational needs of your kids or healthcare if you’re not in a stable place. So it’s kind of the basis of how you deal with the rest of your life.