New York City’s fiscal year starts on July 1, Wednesday, and Mayor Mamdani must continue to resist the City Council’s desire to expand CityFHEPS housing vouchers. It’s a fine program, but expanding it is just too expensive.
The Council had passed the significant ballooning of the program in 2023 but it has never been implemented as successive administrations have pointed out the obvious: it’s an unsustainable added cost with dubious benefit.
Even Mamdani, who had campaigned on the idea of dropping his predecessor’s lawsuit and opposition, has come around and is holding firm as the Council insists on some $300 million in additional costs a year. Still, the question isn’t so much about whether the city could, scrounging around, find some more money right now; it probably could, whether by cutting elsewhere or raiding rainy day funds or doing something else that the Council members themselves might not like.
The problem is that this is not a one-time expenditure — the Council’s expansion of the voucher program means that the city would have to find the money every year indefinitely, probably more of it than is even currently projected given that the expansion actually going into effect would likely attract additional newly eligible applicants. Comptroller Mark Levine has estimated that the cost could rise to some $22 billion over five years, or just about a sixth of an entire annual city budget.
None of this is about whether it is conceptually or morally correct for the city to give more potentially vulnerable renters or would-be renters a helping hand. It’s about the responsibility that City Hall has to ensure that these designs don’t threaten the city’s budget as a whole in the long term, and also that the aid is going first to the most vulnerable.
As we have said before, this expansion has the partial impact of including people that have a much higher relative spending power than the extremely vulnerable people the program was initially designed to protect, and who are not necessarily even at acute risk of eviction, let alone already unhoused.
It makes sense to think through interventions before people actually lose their homes, but this expansion could kick in well before that, months ahead of an eviction proceeding even being filed. The vouchers, of course, only create the ability to receive subsidies for housing; the housing has to exist first, and the uncomfortable truth is it largely doesn’t in New York right now, particularly at the affordable rent band with its well-below-1% vacancy rates.
If you significantly increase the pool of vouchers out there before you have meaningfully increased the actual availability of units for people to spend those vouchers on, what you get is a bigger group of people — some in direr straits than others and probably better able to navigate the system — all competing for the same units with the same tool. The expansion’s Council proponents have never really addressed this point beyond emotional appeals to the plight of overburdened tenants.
We totally agree that this is unacceptable, which is precisely why our leaders should all be focused now on increasing the housing stock before we have conversations about subsidizing more rents. Perhaps when pro-housing policies bear fruit, they can revisit the issue. For now, heed the mayor and drop it.