Housing advocates and City Council members rallied on June 5 to demand that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration stop fighting the 2023 laws that would expand who qualifies for the city’s biggest rental voucher, and start funding them instead. As first reported by AMNY, the Council passed those laws in 2023 over then-Mayor Eric Adams’ veto, but the rules never took effect because the Adams administration sued to stop them, and AMNY reported that Mamdani’s City Hall has kept that court fight going despite campaign promises to the contrary.
CityFHEPS, short for the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement, is the voucher that helps New Yorkers leaving shelters or facing eviction pay rent. The 2023 expansion would ease work requirements for recipients, raise the maximum income limits to qualify, and let people facing eviction get a voucher before they lose their homes, rather than after they land in a shelter.
The fight is about money. Council Member Pierina Sanchez, a Bronx Democrat who chairs the Committee on Housing and Buildings, told protesters that 25,000 evictions could have been avoided if the expansion laws had been enforced.
“Every day that this appeal continues, more families are unnecessarily pushed into crisis,” Sanchez said.
The administration’s position is that the program needs to be fixed before it grows. Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for the Mamdani administration, said City Hall is trying to keep CityFHEPS solvent, not kill 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 started in 2019 at a cost of $25 million. Within six years, the city’s tab for the program ballooned to more than $1 billion as the affordability crisis deepened. The Citizens Budget Commission found the voucher program is not cost-effective over the long term, because vouchers run on a five-year timeline while the average shelter stay is about 15 months. A separate analysis from the Independent Budget Office found the program had been chronically underbudgeted, at times doubling its projected spending by year’s end, though the office also flagged key gaps in the available data that make its true finances hard to pin down.
Shelter providers push back on the idea that the program is too costly to expand. Win, a leading shelter and supportive housing provider, released an analysis finding the city could have saved more than $1 billion by funding the CityFHEPS expansion when it passed in 2023. Win credited those savings to the voucher’s cheaper per diem cost compared with temporary housing, plus shelter reductions it says the city missed out on by not expanding the program.
Kadisha Davis, a mother with the peer-led group Family Action Board, spent more than a year in the city’s shelter system with her daughter. She called the experience “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.
Council Member Sandy Nurse, a Brooklyn Democrat, said funding for the expansion should be a mandate in the new city budget.
“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?”
