New York City is spending billions per year on temporary shelter housing nearly 100,000 people.
Mayor Mamdani came into City Hall clear-eyed about this reality and has made the housing crisis central to his agenda. Prioritizing rental subsidy improvements in his pending housing plan would be fiscally responsible, while improving thousands of lives almost instantaneously.
CityFHEPS (the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement) is one of our most powerful tools for moving families from shelter into permanent housing by providing the resources to pay rent.
Yet today, too many families are stuck waiting to use their voucher because of bureaucratic delays. According to the state comptroller, nearly 80% of eligible households are unable to use their vouchers.
The administration’s new SPEED initiative is a welcome step toward improving voucher utilization and reducing delays. But more must be done to streamline the process and help families move into permanent housing faster.
Our two organizations are seeing this issue firsthand. New Destiny provides housing to survivors of domestic violence — the leading cause of family homelessness in New York — using an evidence-based model of aftercare to break the intergenerational cycle of homelessness and violence. Anthos|Home partners with landlords to bank apartments for voucher holders and clears barriers that keep apartments empty and families waiting.
Consider one recent New Destiny client. She was pregnant in shelter, but because she stopped working to give birth, she lost her voucher eligibility. Despite later resubmitting her income documents, onerous requirements have prevented her from receiving a desperately needed new voucher. Thousands of families have similar experiences with small administrative hurdles that create devastatingly long delays.
Here are a few key areas where the administration can act quickly:
Flag all the problems at once. A voucher application runs more than 100 pages and must clear more than 110 often duplicative criteria, such as verification of income. Voucher holders are required to re-submit the same income and household documentation at multiple points, often to different parties including case workers, brokers, and the city, creating avoidable delays in securing housing. When an application is rejected, the city often flags only the first error, forcing families to resubmit repeatedly for problems that could be fixed in one round.
Invest in helping families find and keep their housing. Finding an apartment is hard. Factor in the paperwork required for subsidized housing, the fact that most homeless families have lost everything, have little or no rental history, and are typically single parents carrying the weight of significant trauma. The city should contract with experienced housing organizations to help families navigate the rental market.
Speed up inspections. Minor repairs routinely delay move-ins by weeks. Trained nonprofit staff should be authorized to sign off on all unit inspections (currently city inspectors cover some of these). We commend the city for proposing virtual inspection sign-offs for small fixes that don’t affect tenant safety and recommend establishing a modest flexible fund for repairs or moving costs that would derail otherwise completed placements.
Finally, the city does not publish data on how long it takes from voucher issuance to move-in. Committing to publish that number — and to cutting it in half — would signal that this administration means it.
New York has already made a significant investment in addressing homelessness. Now it must ensure those investments deliver results. A well-functioning CityFHEPS can get us there.
Branca is the CEO of New Destiny. Lazarus is the CEO of Anthos|Home.