Mayor Mamdani has once wisely again overruled Candidate Mamdani, reversing a brash and reckless campaign promise with the sober reality of governing, this one on the CityFHEPS housing voucher program. Congratulations, Mr. Mayor, again. Today marks 84 “Days of the New Era” since his Jan. 1 swearing in; we’ll see how many flip-flops he completes by Day 100.
City Hall has filed an appeal against a court ruling in favor of the Council’s expansion of CityFHEPS last year, U-turning a campaign pledge to drop the lawsuit and move forward with the costly enlargement to the municipal housing voucher program.
As we said at the time, we have absolutely no doubt that the Council was well-intentioned in promulgating this change. Everybody agrees that housing insecurity is a significant issue for New Yorkers, and there is absolutely a role for city government to facilitate people staying in their homes. Nonetheless, the criteria that the Council landed on was too expansive and too vague.
The Council’s definition of at risk of eviction encompassed anyone who had gotten a demand letter from their landlord, a first step in an often months- or years-long process towards eviction. Obviously, getting such a letter is far from ideal, but there might be all sorts of reasons that an individual or a family could be late enough on rent for a single month that they might get one.
Moving the income cutoff from 200% of the poverty line to 50% of the area median income could similarly add tens of thousands of relatively middle-income families to the CityFHEPS rolls without providing any new places for them to actually go.
The changes would cost billions more, money that is just not available.
The issue here is the same as it’s been since this was first proposed: no amount of vouchers can address the underlying problem of insufficient housing stock. There are a number of reasons why the stock is insufficient, ranging from byzantine land use processes and a persistent anti-development NIMBYism to the warehousing of units that landlords either can’t afford to or don’t think would be profitable enough to rehabilitate and put back on the market to our nonsensical tax system, and the voucher expansion fixes none of them.
Instead, it gives people only tenuously at risk of homelessness access to a voucher originally designed to keep those truly at the brink of eviction out of homeless shelters, a morally laudable and fiscally responsible goal. In adding this population, it puts those less at risk in a form of direct competition for a limited resource with those more at risk, a contest that in all likelihood ends up with those most at risk losing out.
Mamdani and the Council should instead work together on the long-term and lasting solutions to the housing crisis, which boil down to mostly putting new or existing housing stock back online in sufficient numbers to drive exorbitant housing costs down.
The mayor has ample tools now in the aftermath of his predecessor’s passage of the City of Yes package and voters’ approval of the housing-related ballot questions last November. The billions of additional dollars that the voucher program would require can be best spent on subsidizing development.
We understand that this is not going to make Mamdani any friends with his base, with several organizations like Legal Aid Society already decrying what they see as a betrayal. That’s the consequence of going from pure political messaging to actually being faced with difficult choices to ensure the most good for the most New Yorkers, and we commend Mamdani for looking at the data and the reality and making the right choice.