The abrupt end of a federal housing assistance program could put thousands of vulnerable New York City tenants at risk of homelessness and blow a hole in their landlords’ budgets.
The Emergency Housing Voucher Program, created in 2021 to keep 60,000 at-risk renters housed during the pandemic, was funded with $5 billion and supposed to last until September 2030 — allowing tenants to gradually leave the program. But President Donald Trump’s administration announced this spring that funding would run out sometime between 2025 and 2026 due to inflation and rising housing costs.
That sudden lapse could leave little recourse for the 16,105 New York City renters relying on the vouchers, the most of any U.S. city, according to housing advocates. The vouchers were targeted at people fleeing domestic violence, survivors of human trafficking and families in shelters, covering an average $1,900 of a typical $2,300 monthly rent in the city.
Landlords, too, could be left in the lurch. The owners of about 5,700 properties statewide are receiving payments through Emergency Housing Vouchers, including 5,000 buildings in the city, according to an analysis by the New York Housing Conference that was shared with Crain’s. The Bronx accounts for nearly half of the buildings, while Brooklyn makes up one-fourth.
“It was on nobody’s radar that this could be a potential risk,” said Rachel Fee, executive director of the nonprofit Housing Conference. “Building owners were asked to be part of the program, they signed up, they rented units. Now they’re worried about collecting the federal government’s share of the rent and about what’s going to happen to the tenants who won’t be able to afford to stay without a voucher.”
Fee’s group and other housing advocates are pressing Congress to add money to the fund as part of the ongoing budget process, but there are few signs that the Republican-controlled House or Senate will do so. The Housing Conference will present its analysis to New York’s 26 House members, including a breakdown of how many voucher-holders live in each congressional district. (Rep. Ritchie Torres’s South Bronx district leads with 2,256, followed by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Bronx-Queens district with 1,057.)
If that fails, Fee said advocates will press the state or city to come to the rescue, although salvaging the vouchers at the city level would come at a considerable cost of $175 million annually, officials said in April.
Among the worried landlords is Matthew Janeczko, CEO of the nonprofit supportive housing group Sisters of Charity Housing Development. Janeczko’s organization has seven tenants in three Harlem buildings who rely on the vouchers, along with another seven in Rockland County — amounting to about $300,000 annually in federally-funded rental income that is set to vanish.
“Because it was supposed to be 10 years, it gave us, as a nonprofit landlord who always runs tight margins, a sense of security,” said Janeczko, who described the vouchers as highly effective. “Both in Rockland County and in Harlem, Emergency Housing Vouchers either kept people from becoming homeless or made people who were homeless not homeless anymore.”
The demise of EHVs is distinct from the other cuts to federal housing programs being contemplated by Washington Republicans — such as President Trump’s severe proposed cuts to the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which would slash billions of dollars that flow to New York through programs like Section 8. The Washington Post reported this week that it’s unclear whether the Elon Musk-backed Department of Government Efficiency, which has attempted to cancel other federal housing spending, played a role in the voucher program’s wind-down.
Although some experts have said the lapse in voucher funding appears non-ideological, Fee said it is highly unusual for the federal government to let an aid program end abruptly with minimal notification. Trump housing officials have blamed the Biden administration for the fiscal crunch, but have given no guidance to the local agencies that administer the vouchers about how to help tenants stay housed, the Housing Conference said.
About 3,500 New York City apartments being rented with Emergency Housing Vouchers are rent-stabilized. The average income of a city household receiving a voucher is about $18,000, making it highly unlikely that these tenants could feasibly rent a home without the help, according to the Housing Conference report.
Landlords will be left with the option of eating the cost or evicting their tenants due to what amounts to a broken promise by the federal government, the report argues.
“Cutting the funding four years early erodes faith in federal housing programs, making it harder to make public-private partnerships successful in the future, acting as a deterrent to lenders and investors and putting landlords’ — both large and small — financial viability at risk,” the report reads.
