A nonprofit fair housing watchdog on Long Island unexpectedly had a hole blown through its budget by the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.
Long Island’s lone nonprofit dedicated to investigating housing discrimination, Long Island Housing Services, lost $1 million in funding over the next three years, Newsday reported. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development notified LIHS of the funding cut in a letter last week, effective immediately.
“We have to figure out how to fill that hole in our budget to continue with current staff and the level of services we’ve been providing to Long Islanders,” said LIHS executive director Ian Wilder.
The grant the government is pulling represents roughly 20 percent of the nonprofit’s annual budget.
Wilder said the government claimed the money no longer supported HUD priorities or goals of the federal Fair Housing Initiatives Program. LIHS investigates housing discrimination complaints and regularly makes headlines for nabbing settlements from landlords and brokers over the allegations it probes.
Wilder plans to dip into cash reserves to fund its housing programs and avoid layoffs for his 12-person staff, but said he intends to reevaluate the situation in nine months should the federal funding not be restored.
LIHS is not the only nonprofit in the industry suffering, as HUD has canceled roughly half of the hundreds of fair housing grants it provided across the country. The Fair Housing Justice Center, which operates out of Queens, lost a third of its federal fair housing funding, $260,000 in all.
“Fair housing, in general, has historically enjoyed bipartisan support,” co-founder Fred Freiberg said. “This is a departure from that and it does appear this administration is saying this is not a priority for them.”
Nonprofits are vital to the ecosystem that thwarts housing discrimination. In the United States, they handled three-quarters of the public complaints in 2023, according to the National Fair Housing Alliance.
— Holden Walter-Warner
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