Housing advocates and City Council members gathered on June 5 to pressure the Mamdani administration to fund and implement 2023 laws expanding the city’s CityFHEPS rental voucher program. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s City Hall has kept challenging those laws in court despite his campaign commitments on housing.
CityFHEPS, the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement, is a city-run program that helps low-income New Yorkers pay rent through housing vouchers. The 2023 City Council legislation, passed over then-Mayor Eric Adams’ veto, would ease work requirements for voucher recipients, raise income limits, and extend eligibility to tenants facing eviction. The Adams administration challenged the expansion laws in court, and the Mamdani administration has continued that challenge, saying the program needs financial reforms before it can be expanded.
Council Member Pierina Sanchez (D-Bronx), who chairs the Council’s Committee on Housing and Buildings, told protesters that 25,000 evictions could have been prevented had the expansion laws been enforced. “Every day that this appeal continues, more families are unnecessarily pushed into crisis,” Sanchez said.
Council Member Sandy Nurse (D-Brooklyn) told the crowd that CityFHEPS funding should be treated as a budget mandate. “It would be immoral for us not to have a significant expansion of CityFHEPS if we tried to pass a council budget,” Nurse said. “The cost of living has not gone down, the cost of rent has not gone down, the cost of groceries has not gone down, utilities haven’t gone down. So what the hell are we doing here?”
Kadisha Davis, a member of the peer-led organization Family Action Board, spent more than a year in the city shelter system with her daughter and described the conditions as “traumatic.” “Most of us like myself-I paid into the system since I was 14-taking out taxes, but when I need your help, you neglected me and my family? That’s a problem,” Davis said.
The Mamdani administration says it supports CityFHEPS and that its objection is about the program’s cost. Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for City Hall, said the administration sees the program as essential but wants to put it on stable footing before expanding it. “Mayor Mamdani has been clear that this Administration believes that CityFHEPS is a lifeline for thousands of New Yorkers leaving the shelter system and seeking stable housing,” Rauschenbach said in a statement. “As the stewards of CityFHEPS, and as an administration that firmly believes in its purpose, we want to protect it by placing it on firm financial footing. That is why we are pursuing major reforms that protect the program’s future.”
CityFHEPS launched in 2019 with a $25 million budget; by 2025, costs grew to over $1 billion, according to AM New York. A Citizens Budget Commission analysis found the program is not cost-effective in the long run, citing the mismatch between the five-year length of vouchers and the 15-month average shelter stay. The Independent Budget Organization (IBO) found the program had been chronically underbudgeted, at times spending double its annual projections within a single year. The IBO noted significant data gaps that limit any definitive cost assessment.
Win, a shelter and supportive housing provider, disputed those conclusions in its own analysis, projecting that the city could have saved over $1 billion by implementing the 2023 expansion when it passed. Win attributed those projected savings to lower per-diem costs compared to shelter stays and to shelter population reductions the city forfeited by delaying the program.
Featured image: NYC Mayor’s Office / CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
