For one glorious week last June, the city opened a rent-voucher portal that had been closed for 15 years.
Through the magic door rushed 600,000 New Yorkers applying for Section 8, which comes from the federal government and is distributed by the New York City Housing Authority. NYCHA gets the money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development and forwards it to landlords. But first, it has to award Housing Choice Vouchers to tenants.
From those applicants, NYCHA selected 200,000 by lottery. Cue the politicians.
Mayor Eric Adams, in a press release, touted the “much-needed relief to families searching for affordable housing.” And then-Deputy Mayor Maria Torres-Springer said it “will be a lifeline to 200,000 New Yorkers who need affordable housing.”
These statements were a stretch, to say the least.
No, 200,000 New Yorkers did not get a lifeline. They got on a waiting list to get a lifeline.
And the lifeline has no apartment on the other end of it. Tenants have 180 days to find a unit eligible for the voucher and a willing landlord — not easy in a city with a 1.4 percent vacancy rate.
Now, the punchline: Nine months after the application window closed, NYCHA has worked its way through 12,000 applications and only 318 have succeeded. In a city with nearly 6 million renters, 318 is the statistical equivalent of zero.
The numbers are mind-boggling. Only 1 of every 45 tenants handed a voucher has rented an apartment with it. At its current pace, NYCHA will take nine more years to get through the 188,000 people on the waitlist. Last time it took 15 years.
What are the lessons here? Besides not trusting quotes from politicians, that is.
One takeaway is that the ongoing battles over vouchers are a sideshow if the programs don’t get people into apartments and money in landlords’ pockets.
The City Council is fighting the Adams administration for more CityPHEPS vouchers, and New York City landlord and tenant groups are doing the same in Albany for state vouchers. More efficiency should be at least as high of a priority.
The New York Apartment Association has made this point often, but the process remains tedious, overly bureaucratic and often arbitrary. A tenant could beat the deadline, only to have an inspector reject the apartment for some picayune reason. Hello, homeless shelter.
An even more overlooked lesson is that the vacancy rate is too low for vouchers to achieve their potential. City lawmakers have not done enough to increase the supply of multifamily housing, and state legislators have done virtually nothing.
A final point: State law should be changed to allow the full value of vouchers to be used at rent-stabilized apartments. Right now, the “legal rent” is the maximum the landlord can receive, even if the voucher is worth more.
This means, for Section 8, New York is leaving federal money on the table, even as our politicians complain about Congress and the Trump administration cutting Medicaid and other funding (this $80 million, for example).
Tenants with Housing Choice Vouchers don’t make much money. The income threshold for an individual is $54,350 a year and $69,900 for a family of three.
Letting them use their vouchers in full would give them a huge advantage over non-voucher holders (who are typically wealthier) in securing rent-stabilized units, which are about half of all rental units in the city. For probably the only time in their lives, they could actually outbid rich people.
This would make rent stabilization more like an affordable housing program, boost revenue at buildings that desperately need it for operating expenses and repairs and steer higher earners into market-rate units, where they belong.
Some groups purportedly advocating for tenants oppose any change to this rule. They don’t want landlords to get more money. There is no obvious policy rationale except to force more buildings into foreclosure.
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