Tenant, real estate groups team up against rent hike for some voucher recipients

A diverse coalition of advocacy organizations including shelter provider Win, the Legal Aid Society and the Real Estate Board of New York are teaming up to oppose a proposed rent hike for some New York City housing voucher recipients.

A new rule proposed by Mayor Eric Adams’ administration would increase the portion of income that certain CityFHEPS housing voucher recipients would pay toward their rent. Voucher recipients with earned income and renewing for a sixth year would pay 40% of their income on rent – up from 30%. The city told Gothamist last month that the rules change would impact a quarter of voucher recipients, but officials have since revised that estimate down to 3-4% – or about 1,800 households for the next fiscal year. 

“This change is meant to assist those households with a gradual transition off CityFHEPS as they achieve self-sufficiency,” the description of the proposed rules change reads. “Taking a financially sustainable approach is better than having to make harder decisions down the line which could impact extensions or the issuance of new vouchers,” Department of Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park told Gothamist. 

The city says the  voucher program has been successful in helping people move out of shelter and obtain permanent housing or stay in their homes – 31,000 New Yorkers used it to do so last year, the city reports – but maintains that it needs to find ways to manage the costs of the program. The city’s spending on CityFHEPS has grown significantly since fiscal year 2021, when it spent $253 million on the program, to this fiscal year, when its anticipated spending will reach $1.25 billion, according to the city. 

But Win, joined by organizations including Community Service Society, the Coalition for the Homeless and VOCAL-NY, is rallying against the proposed hike, which will face a public hearing on May 30. The group has written letters to City Hall and hopes to get mayoral candidates to commit to reversing the change if it’s enacted. “We don’t need to make changes to that program which are going to force more people to be unable to pay their rent, face evictions and end up in shelter or on the street,” said Christine Quinn, CEO of Win and the former speaker of the City Council.

In a statement, the Adams administration criticized Quinn for rallying against the proposed change given the program’s ballooning costs. “Well-paid professional advocates make their money by criticizing the mayor with one hand, while cashing checks from the city in the other,” City Hall spokesperson William Fowler said in a statement. “The proposed change would only apply to those with a steady job, after receiving CityFHEPS payments for five years, allowing us to focus our resources on the city’s most vulnerable while protecting the long-term financial stability of the program overall. This coalition fails to acknowledge the five-fold increase in spending on CityFHEPS under the Adams administration, or the fact that the city is moving more families out of shelter and into subsidized permanent housing than ever before. … Professional advocates should be directing their frustrations at other levels of government for defunding rental assistance programs as the city has stepped up year after year to fill the gap.”

The Adams administration and the City Council are locked in a legal battle over a package of bills passed by the council that would expand eligibility for the vouchers. After those bills were passed in 2023, the administration took some steps to expand eligibility, including getting rid of a rule that required a household to have been in shelter for 90 days before becoming eligible for the vouchers, but some advocates said that didn’t go far enough.

A coalition that includes groups like the Legal Aid Society, the Community Service Society and REBNY, which lobbies and advocates on behalf of landlords, isn’t unheard of, but those groups have often been at odds over issues splitting tenants and landlords – like the recent law passed by the City Council restricting broker’s fees.

But advocating for rental assistance has at times brought the strange bedfellows together. “We think of REBNY and real estate as the big guys,” Quinn said. “But there are a lot of small- and medium-sized building owners who really are the pipeline for the apartments that our staff helps our clients find. For those landlords, vouchers can be a very stable source of income that allows them to support themselves and their families.”