New York City Voucher Program Fails Homeless Families

Sound asleep during the night in her metal bunk bed, Kenyatta Washington woke up to what she thought was paper rattling. She told herself that maybe her dog Princess had gotten out of her cage and was rummaging through the trash. Her husband asked her to be quiet because their 7-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son were asleep just a few feet away, and right across from them on another set of metal bunk beds, their 21-year-old daughter slept above her 14-year-old younger brother.

All of a sudden, Washington’s 7-year-old daughter, Karma, was screaming and crying. Water was leaking out of the ceiling onto her bed. That was the noise Washington had heard: the pitter-patter of a ceiling leak on her daughter’s mattress. This was not the first time something had broken in their room in the shelter, but it was the first time the ceiling had sprung a leak right on top of her daughter in the middle of the night. 

Karma was hysterical. She thought she’d had a bad dream, and that she was still in it. But it wasn’t a dream. Washington climbed up the metal ladder to her daughter’s bunk bed, trying to calm her. “It’s okay,” she told her daughter.  “Calm down.” She brought her daughter down from the wet bed and carried her over to her husband. “I was dreaming I was drowning and you weren’t there!” Karma said to her mother. 

That night, the six members of the Washington family slept on 4 beds pushed together in their small room in the shelter. “It almost made us feel like we were back home and, you know, we had to sleep together to keep warm or something,” said Washington.

Ten years ago, the Washington family came to New York from South Carolina because Kenyatta and her husband couldn’t find work and were living out of their car with their three children. Her husband, Theo, is from New York, and they felt they would have more opportunities here. But it has proven difficult.

Since September 2019, the Washington family has lived at WIN Family Homeless Shelter in deep Brooklyn, near Broadway Junction. And despite 51-year-old Theo working full time as a doorman, the Washington family cannot afford the rent on an apartment of their own. 

Since they entered the shelter, Washington has been working to find a way for her family to get out of the shelter and into an apartment. She wants a place where her daughter can play with her dollhouse, and where they won’t have to worry about shelter staff scolding them for having a cluttered room. As of now, the majority of their belongings are in storage nearby. Kenyatta wants an apartment of her own so she can cook a real holiday meal for her family, and start baking again; she hopes to be able to host her entire extended family for a gathering. 

Three months ago, Kenyatta received the news she had been waiting for when she called 311, the New York State phone line for non-emergency services, and they told her that she had been approved for a city-funded housing voucher. She was very excited. The voucher, called CityFHEPS, provides subsidized apartments to homeless New Yorkers. Based on their family size, the Washingtons are eligible for apartments with monthly rents of up to $2,805 a month. Washington has been able to find plenty of apartments within this price range. But almost every time she has told a landlord or broker that she has a city voucher, the conversation ends.

Away from her children for a moment, leaning against the shelter building one evening, Washington explains that she is depressed. She feels like the housing search is never going to end. But, she says, “I just have to pack it down and keep going,” as she lives in close quarters with her kids and she knows showing her vulnerability is not an option. 

In the shelter, children cannot be unattended for any period of time, so Kenyatta will sit on the floor of the hallway and do her schoolwork on her laptop while her daughter roller blades up and down the hall. It took her a long time to get the voucher, and she does not want to lose it. But so far, the voucher has proved to be nothing more than a piece of paper. 

History of Subsidized Housing in New York

For decades, low-income families in the United States have counted on the government to help them afford a roof over their heads. 

Starting in the 1930s, the federal government funded the building of large public housing projects in cities across the country. These were initially popular, but over time the buildings deteriorated, and the government was loath to fund repairs. 

In 1974, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development created the first voucher program in the nation, called Section 8, after the section of the housing legislation that authorized it. It helped people with the lowest incomes afford housing in the private housing market by paying landlords the difference between what a household could afford and the actual rent. The Section 8 voucher program provided an alternative to the government funding the construction of affordable multifamily apartments. While some of the Section 8 vouchers were still fixed to a specific property, others allowed tenants to choose where they wanted to live. The freedom to choose where to live was an attempt to decrease the concentration of low-income individuals in housing projects. In 1978, Section 8 was renamed the Housing Choice Voucher Program, but most people still know it as Section 8.

The Section 8 program was effective in many places, like Dayton, Ohio, that had a surplus of private housing. In places like New York, it was less so. The general manager of the New York City Housing Authority was quoted by the New York Times in 1987 saying that “the most fundamental fault in the voucher program is that it does not create new housing.” In the same article, Chuck Schumer, at the time a Democratic Congressman from Brooklyn, compared housing vouchers to a fig leaf that allowed the federal government administration to “gracefully exit from the housing stage without admitting they're naked.” 

According to the sociologist Eva Rosen, in her book The Voucher Promise, vouchers should be considered a limited success. They allowed people to move out of disintegrating projects, and they increased demand for housing in places that had excess supply. But they were hard to administer and did not in the end make a real dent in the housing crisis in the U.S., as people often struggled to find a place to live with the voucher. Increasing voucherization came against a backdrop of overall federal disinvestment from affordable housing. Between 1976 and 1996, the federal Housing and Urban Development funding dropped from $33.2 billion (in 2004 constant dollars) to $19.2 billion (in 2004 constant dollars). During this period, the homeless population also increased: in 1986 there were around 300,000 people in the U.S. living in temporary shelters or on the street; by 1996 there were around 640,000. That number is around 500,000 today, although many homeless people are often overlooked in the counting, as it occurs on one night in a year. In recent years, in part due to the decrease in federal funding, states and municipalities have stepped in to create their own voucher programs. In New York City, the first of these was a New York State-funded program called the Family Eviction Prevention Supplement (or FEPS), from 2005, geared toward keeping people in danger of eviction in their apartments.

In 2007, FEPS was replaced by a new voucher program called Advantage. Advantage vouchers were geared specifically to homeless individuals who had been in the shelter system for more than sixty days. To qualify for an Advantage voucher, at least one household member had to work as well as engage in approved activities for a set period of time.  During the Advantage voucher era, the New York City Human Resources Administration was notorious for deeming people living in subsidized housing “non-compliant,” making them suddenly lose their public assistance benefits. A person could be deemed non-compliant, for example, if they failed to attend a mandatory addiction recovery meeting. During this era, said Lynn Lewis, the former director of Picture the Homeless, who has worked for over twenty years advocating for housing for homeless people, landlords became skeptical about accepting programs, in part because the city so frequently cut off their tenants and stopped paying their rent.

In April 2011, then-governor Andrew Cuomo cut the state share of Advantage, and the city was unable to afford it on its own. From 2011 until 2014, there were no city-funded voucher programs, although the federally-funded Housing Choice (Section 8) continued. Yet the problem remained: there were simply were not enough spots available. 

In 2014, the new Mayor, Bill de Blasio, established what was called the Living in Communities, or LINC, voucher program. It was meant to promote stable housing for homeless residents, but “proved kind of unwieldy,” said Brooklyn Councilmember Stephen Levin, who has been working on affordable housing legislation for over a decade. The LINC program was divided into six different vouchers based on characteristics like income, housing status, and history of domestic violence. Initially, according to Levin, New York State paid a reasonable portion of the expenses, but as time went on, they paid less and less.  By the end of the LINC voucher program, in 2018, New York state was only paying for 9% of the program, while criticizing New York City’s handling of the program and trying to control its design. 

Fed up with dealing with New York state, in 2018 a new housing voucher program called CityFHEPS was created. It replaced the LINC voucher programs. It is fully funded by New York City tax dollars and intends to provide rent supplements for people moving out of shelters and into their own apartments. The budget for the CityFHEPS program is not set, and thus there is not a limited number of vouchers. Instead, it is determined by usage. So, hypothetically, if all voucher holders found suitable apartments, the budget would adjust accordingly.

But CityFHEPS has not been utilized anywhere close to its full capacity. According to data obtained by Levin from the city, approximately 5,000 voucher holders (a mix of families and single adults) were able to move out of shelters using a CityFHEPS voucher in the first ten months of 2019. Overall, this was just about 10% of the 50,000 people living in shelters in New York City; in any given month, as Levin pointed out, only about 4 percent of voucher holders were successful in landing an apartment. It was, incredibly, the most successful affordable housing program in the city—during the same year, NYCHA units decreased by 2,000 and the “affordable” units in private developments yielded just 1,000 units.  But people with vouchers were under the impression that they were going to get an apartment, and very few of them did.

Earlier this year, the passage of new legislation offered a glimmer of hope for the program.  On September 1st, the value of CityFHEPS vouchers increased by 40 percent for a family of four. Now, the value of CityFHEPS vouchers is the same as Section 8.

So far, however, the program has continued to deal with a myriad of issues that have prevented voucher holders like the Washington family from actually finding a place to live. Some landlords are skeptical of the program because they have been burned by the city before. Some complain of past voucher holders destroying their property. And some simply don’t want to rent their apartments to homeless people, many of whom are Hispanic and Black. 

Kenyatta’s Family Search for Housing

Kenyatta Washington looked tired and worn out as she spoke to me outside her Brooklyn shelter, leaning against the wall for stability. There is no outdoor seating outside the shelter, although that doesn’t stop people from sitting on the sidewalk stoop and smoking a cigarette or sharing a meal out of a Tupperware with their family. While I spoke to Kenyatta, Adele Pavia, another mother who lives in the shelter with her four children, was sitting on the stoop and eating homemade beans and rice as her husband held their nine-month-old daughter. He doesn’t live in the shelter and is not allowed inside. Pavia had not learned to manage the complicated web of social services, as Kenyatta had. Pavia, who came to the United States from Mexico, had never heard of the CityFHEPS voucher. She said in Spanish her social worker told her if she wants to find an apartment, she has to have a job. So she is looking for work as a house cleaner or factory worker. 

Kenyatta’s big piercing eyes were almost unsettling at first, but in speaking with her, you settled into them and understood her fierce eyes and strong gaze as merely a hard shell she has put on out of necessity. With time, you came to understand how painful it has been for her to not be able to give her children a roof of their own over their heads.

Just a couple of days before we met, Washington had gone to see an apartment on Highland Street in East Brooklyn. It was a nice apartment in a 3-unit townhouse near a park. Kenyatta imagined herself having the space to host her entire family for thanksgiving and to be able to cook and bake for her family. But as she walked to the apartment she saw five other perspective families standing in line for the same place, some of them accompanied by their caseworkers at the showing, and others with income of their own. She has not heard back from the broker since she applied. And this is all too common. More often than not, when she tells a landlord or a broker that she has a housing voucher, she says, they stop replying to texts and answering phone calls. 

Kenyatta’s 6-person family is eligible for a 3-bedroom apartment that rents for up to $2,805 a month. Since her husband works a minimum wage job full-time, their contribution amount is $1,030. But Kenyatta says landlords would rather have a tenant with a lower contribution, as they would then get the full rent directly from the city, as opposed to relying on a higher contribution on behalf of the tenant. 

“The city is allocating the money, it is the landlords that get to pick and choose who they want,” said Kenyatta. She believes they do not want her family because their contribution is too high. 

“We are a working-class family, we are not looking for a handout, just help,” she says, frustrated that landlords would choose an unemployed voucher holder over her family who is has one employed adult. 

For Washington, it has been one roadblock after the next. For months before Washington even received the voucher, she was trying to get an answer from the city about the status of her application. Washington was persistent. She told me that she called 311 so frequently to ask for status updates that they knew her name. When she finally got the voucher, she felt like the hardest part was behind her.

Even when Kenyatta and her husband were working, they did not make enough income to pay rent and feed their children. Now Kenyatta chooses to attend school full-time as otherwise, the family income would become too high for benefits (but too low to actually afford anything). It would disqualify her six-person family from SNAP or ‘food stamps,’ and would also make them ineligible for the CityFHEPS voucher. 

Housing rights activist Marcus Moore, who for years was the go-to-homeless person for media outlets in New York City, told me that he is concerned about the income cliff requirements of the CityFHEPS voucher, which he believes disincentivize voucher holders from working and moving up in their jobs. You have to earn 200% below the federal poverty level to qualify for the voucher. 

Not all homeless families can stay together for as long as Kenyatta Washington’s family has. Robert Bynum, who often sleeps under scaffolding on Broadway near 96th Street, said he chose to send his son to live with a friend to give him a stable life, after couch surfing and sleeping on the street with him when he was young. He technically stays at the Wingate Hotel on 21st Street in Queens, but most nights, he chooses to sleep on the street, preferring that over sharing a room with another man he doesn’t know. Like Kenyatta’s family, he also has an active CityFHEPS voucher. And this isn't his first. He says he is on his second or third voucher now. As long as a homeless person keeps their public assistance case open and their income doesn’t change, their voucher will automatically renew. It does not expire. But he is still sleeping on the street. Bynum says he has tried to search for apartments, but “nobody ain’t take them.” 

“Some of us that have vouchers need a place to get back on our feet,” he said. The city is “slamming the door in the wrong peoples' faces and opening the doors in the wrong peoples' faces.” He has noticed landlords on the Upper West Side renting to wealthy people who already have a place to live, instead of to homeless people. 

Housing-based discrimination

Although in New York City it is technically illegal to discriminate against someone because their rent is being paid in full or in part by the government instead of directly by them, it is not uncommon. 

The Human Rights Commission investigates reports of landlords or brokers telling voucher holders they do not accept vouchers or refusing to show them an apartment if they have a voucher. In 2020, they investigated 493 complaints of tenants being discriminated against based on their income; 177 of these cases were solved through mediation between the landlord and the tenant. But the Human Rights Commission's budget is small and they only have around 140 employees working on investigating human rights issues in New York City, with source of income discrimination only a portion of their work. 

“The ability to enforce this [at a larger scale] would have a huge impact on the unhoused population of New York City because giving vouchers to people without making landlords accept them really is no way to get people housed,” said Katherine Carroll, a lawyer at the Human Rights Commission.

Rob Robinson, a senior advisor for Partner for Dignity and Rights, who has advocated to end homelessness for more than a decade, said that New York City should have a civilian complaint review board to hold government agencies accountable. “And it needs to have teeth,” he added. Robinson, like many other advocates, believes that people with lived experience of homelessness need not only to have a seat at the table but also a voice. 

In one of the commission’s largest enforcement actions, Pinnacle Management, a group which as of 2006 had filed 5,000 eviction lawsuits, paid $50,000 in damages for denying an apartment to a tenant using rental assistance. A restorative justice approach also led to the management firm agreeing to allocate four apartments specifically to voucher-holding tenants. This was a win for the Human Rights Commission and homeless advocates, but only represents a dent in the ecosystem of landlords not wanting to accept tenants using subsidized housing vouchers. 

A lawsuit filed in March of this year by the Housing Rights Initiative alleged that 88 landlords and residential brokerages in the city discriminated against prospective tenants trying to use Section 8 housing vouchers. 

Councilmember Levin said that administrative issues, such as landlords not getting paid on time, or getting checks sent in the mail instead of direct deposit, have hurt the CityFHEPS program. 

To aid low-income New Yorkers who get doors slammed in their face by landlords and brokers when looking for apartments, the Mayor’s office has a Home Support Unit phone line which is designed to educate landlords and brokers about CityFHEPS vouchers, as well as compile available units. The office could not provide the exact number of units they have on their list, but said that at any given time, they have “several hundred units available.” 

Yet more than five voucher holders living in the shelter system told me that their case manager and housing specialist did not provide them with information on available units. 

The Mayor’s office also does other outreach, including a tweet posted by the Department of Homeless Services on November 24th. It urged landlords and brokers to call the support line if they have an apartment to lease. The tweet has 3 likes and 2 retweets. Buried in the Human Resources Administration website is information for tenants on how to report a landlord or broker refusing to rent to a voucher holder. It advises prospective tenants to listen for phrases like “We don’t take programs,” and “Don’t you have any other income?” 

Unlike the Human Rights Commission, however, the Human Resource Administration's Source of Income Discrimination Unit files lawsuits on behalf of the City of New York, not individuals. Given that voucher holders will not directly benefit from reporting discrimination, this process is not preferred by housing rights activists. 

And their actions have not proved sufficient. A group of landlords has been posting anonymous stories on a website called nycfheps.com warning other landlords not to accept housing vouchers. One story on the site is titled, “I made a deal with CityFHEPS and they are not paying the rent.” Another is called: “Do not rent to someone with a CityFHEPS voucher and it’s not the tenant’s fault.” In this post, a landlord complained of their tenant losing their housing voucher because their unemployment payment increased. If a voucher holder’s income goes over 200 percent of the federal poverty line, their case will suddenly close. 

On the site, landlords complain of the city not paying rent on time, of receiving a check in the wrong name, as well as tenants not paying their portion of the rent. A post called “The city lies to both the people using vouchers and the landlords” complains that New York City does not tell voucher holders what portion of the rent they will be responsible for until after the paperwork goes through, making it hard for them to pay on time. Households pay varying amounts depending upon income. 

When a tenant has a change in income, and their case is closed, landlords stop receiving rental payments. If a tenant refuses to move out voluntarily, a landlord must evict. This process is long and complicated, especially during the pandemic. 

On September 1st, the value of the CityFHEPS voucher increased. Before the increase, which went into effect on September 1st, the voucher subsidized one-room apartments that cost up to $1,265 a month. Now, voucher holders are eligible for studios that rent up to $1,900, values in line with Section 8 fair market rents.  This came after years of advocates complaining that the value of the vouchers was too low.

Amy Blumsack, the director of organizing and policy at Neighbors Together, a group that helps the homeless, said some of her members were told they have to re-submit all of their application materials since the change. Others were told that was unnecessary. 

A spokesperson for the Mayor’s office clarified that as long as a tenant's public assistance case is still active, they need not reapply. 

Glenisha James, a voucher holder in Brooklyn, said her case manager only cares about getting the appointment slip (the form which proves she has met with her client) signed and does not offer real help. Elkin Vaez, another voucher holder, says her case manager was completely unaware of the increase. 

Tomas Kiss-Farengo, a social worker and former client care coordinator at HELP USA Shelter and WIN Family Shelter’s, described the family shelters in Queens that he worked at for a year and a half as “like a prison that you are allowed to leave.” In a shelter with 60 families, many of whom had a history of domestic violence, prostitution, and other trauma, he was one of two social workers. In the basement cubicles of the shelter, he worked alongside three case managers and just one housing specialist, responsible for helping the 60 families fill out applications for voucher programs and find housing. Kiss-Farengo said that although he was technically a social worker, he often took on the role of case manager and housing specialist -- helping shelter clients do things like obtain social security cards and fill out and fax in housing applications. He said shelter staff would often get blamed for administrative issues, such as families accounts getting suspended for six months after applying for housing through the NYC Housing Authority. He said there were only two public computers in the shelter’s playroom, which sometimes would be occupied by children playing games or working on a school project. They were very slow, and sometimes shelter residents did not know the log-in. 

“The city needs to have a clear process for distributing the information to both voucher holders and workers about how this is gonna roll out, and they didn't, and it's been very very confusing and really frustrating,” said Blumsack. 

The city could make this process much easier if they had the political will, said Josh Dean, executive director of Human.NYC whose organization supports unsheltered people. 

Elizabeth Adams, the legislative aide in the office of Stephen Levin who wrote the legislation, said the city has a responsibility to make sure the voucher is getting people into housing. 

Voucher holders understand that their case managers and housing specialists are busy, and do what they can to find units on their own. Voucher holders navigating the process are using Facebook groups formed to share community resources and ask the few who have been successful advice on how to navigate the complex system. They share contact information for brokers who are known to be considerate of voucher holders and congratulate group members when they post that they finally found an apartment. 

Once someone is approved for an apartment, rent is paid directly to landlords. New York City incentivizes landlords to accept voucher holders by paying the first four months of rent up-front. 

“The caseloads are large,” said Blumsack of the case managers and housing specialists whose job is to help those with vouchers find a suitable apartment and lead them through the long and complicated process of filling out paperwork, submitting over ten documents, and doing a walk-through inspection of apartments. A streamlined digitized system for this process does not exist. Kiss-Farengo said that social workers in the shelter usually last a year, while case managers last 6 months or less.

Jamie Powlovich, the executive director of the Coalition for Homeless Youth who has worked closely with the Department of Social Services, said there are not enough case managers and housing specialists to meet the need.

Providing homeless people with a place to live has proven to be the best solution to ending homelessness. In 2019, only 1.3% of homeless people who left a shelter with subsidized housing ended up back in the shelter, according to the Mayor’s office.

“In an ideal world, the city would invest resources to house people, but that would take a really big effort that we haven’t seen,” said Blumsack.

In all, many advocates believe that housing vouchers like CityFHEPS, which are not project-based, meaning that they are not tied to a specific unit, are never going to solve contemporary homelessness in New York City. Until New York City invests in building affordable housing, families like Kenyatta will remain in shelters, and people will continue to live on the streets.

Back at the shelter where Kenyatta and her family live, families continue to endure the daily struggles of living in a shelter with a housing voucher, but no real way to find a place to live with it.

Outside the front door of the shelter, Kativa Foster, a 43-year-old mom, sat in the front seat as three of her kids hung out in the back of her old black van, filled with empty bags of chips and packets of Kool-aid. She was wearing a shirt that said “Nothing to Wear,” and, as we spoke, was asking her daughter to stop screaming, and her five-year-old son who is autistic and non-verbal to put his pants back on. She ended up in the shelter a week after her 2 ½-year-old daughter was born, back in July of 2019. She had been living in Section 8 housing but said soon after the death of her mother, her landlord got foreclosed upon, and she didn’t have anywhere to go. The marshals had shown up and forced her out of her home. For the first part of her pregnancy, she and her children crashed with friends and family, but eventually, she ended up in the shelter system. Her daughter was just a week old when she entered the shelter.

“This is like a little hiccup, a little bump in the road, you know?” she said. But the numbers tell a different story. On average, families remain in the shelter for 438 days. 

Two months after entering the shelter, Foster got a FHEPS voucher, which is the state-funded version of CityFHEPS. She said she worked with three different brokers and applied for ten or twelve apartments with no success. Brokers “will tell you to come in, they will tell you to print out, they'll have you fill out an application and everything, and they just won't select you. I don't know why,” she said.  

“I feel like right now out in New York City, it's the luck of the draw -- it’s the luck of the Irish or knowing somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody type thing.” Other than that, “ass out,” she said. 

“Nobody wants to live here,” Foster said of the shelter, which is notorious for having mice, roaches, and unhelpful (albeit overburdened) workers. When I was outside the shelter around dusk, a group of people walked out, and Kenyatta Washington told me it was the new cohort of case managers. Every few months she said, the old case managers quit, and new ones come in. 

But two weeks ago, Foster received a call that she had won the housing lottery for an apartment in the Bronx, and she is hopeful that by Christmas, she might be able to move out of the shelter and into her own apartment. So far, Kenyatta and her family have not been so lucky.