Thousands of apartments that homeless New Yorkers qualified for through city housing vouchers remained unavailable to them last year thanks to a tangle of red tape that advocates say is keeping the homeless in shelters far longer than needed.
The vouchers — known as Family Homelessness and Eviction Protection Supplements, or FHEPS — became more valuable last year after the city passed a law increasing their worth. Gov. Hochul also signed off on a separate provision allowing the state to cover 100% of a market rate rent through its vouchers — up from the previous 85%.
The increased value has made it easier for people living in shelters to financially qualify for renting apartments, but city records obtained through a Freedom of Information request filed by the non-profit Urban Justice Center show that, of those who did qualify for city vouchers, a relatively small percentage were actually able to move out of shelters and into a new home.
Last December, 2,623 households were approved by a landlord for rental through city FHEPS vouchers. That then paved the way for them to apply to the city to move in. But only 637 — 24% of them — were able to actually secure an apartment, the records show.
A similar pattern played out in prior months. In November 2021, 3,230 households were offered apartments by a landlord through the city vouchers, but only 395 moved into a new place using the vouchers. In October, 2,691 qualified with a landlord, but only 370 moved in.
Helen Strom, director of benefits and homeless advocacy at the Urban Justice Center’s Safety Net Project, which provided the records to the Daily News, blamed the reason for that disparity on a rigid system that tends to stymie the needy and poor instead of helping them.
“The people who aren’t moving in is because of the bureaucracy,” she said. “It just doesn’t work.”
Strom described a recent example where prospective tenants working with housing case workers at homeless shelters were rejected by the city’s Department of Social Services for neglecting to use the abbreviation for street — even though it appeared in several portions of the application — and another situation where using the name of a real estate broker, rather than the name of the company, got an application tossed.
More than once, Mayor Adams has outlined his intention to cut the red tape New Yorkers face when dealing with municipal government and even hired an “efficiency czar,” Melanie LaRocca, as his chief efficiency officer to lead in that effort.
He has also stressed the need for people living in the streets to move into homeless shelters — and has instituted a policy of removing homeless encampments from city streets — but people already in shelters contend it’s often a grueling slog to get through the city’s byzantine process and find a permanent home.
According to Strom, once a housing application is rejected by the city, instead of having the ability to correct it and move on, the applicant is forced to resubmit the full application packet to a new case worker. Errors that may have existed in the original paperwork, but which weren’t corrected in the first go-round, would start the process again.
Strom acknowledged the need for a process, which is ostensibly in place to ensure prospective tenants aren’t moving into apartments with outstanding building code violations or safety issues. But she added that often the current system results in the city rejecting tenants for picayune reasons that have nothing to do with their well-being.
“Each time there’s a rejection or a delay for one of these reasons, you’re starting the packet from scratch,” Strom said. “They just assign a new person each time who’s not familiar with it.”
Sherica Bonds, 35, told The News on Friday that she doesn’t understand why her application was rejected.
“It’s completely frustrating,” she said. “I don’t know what to do.”
Bonds was pushed into the city’s shelter system last spring after the Harlem art gallery where she worked closed down due to COVID. That left her unable to pay her rent. And since then, she said she’s encountered one obstacle after another in her effort to find a permanent place to live.
After losing her job, she moved in with her family, but after that apartment became too crowded she had to move into the Franklin Women’s Shelter in the Bronx. From there she migrated to homeless shelters two more times before being sent to a Hampton Inn in Midtown Manhattan as part of the city’s COVID policy of social distancing the homeless by placing them in underused hotels.
After the city abandoned that policy, she was transferred to a shelter on 126th St. in Harlem, where she’s now staying.
She said she received a FHEPS voucher in April 2021 through the city’s Human Resources Administration, which falls under the umbrella of the Department of Social Services. But finding an apartment proved difficult, she recalled, because the landlords she approached either refused to accept the voucher or ignored her.
By December 2021, her voucher had expired. So she applied for one again. But after securing it and finding a landlord at an Inwood building that would accept it, she’s come up against yet another obstacle.
The city’s Department of Social Services rejected her preclearance application for the apartment because the current landlord did not match up with the deed, according to a broker who works for Bonds and asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation. The broker noted that the rejection didn’t include any instruction on how the issue could be remedied.
“They won’t tell us anything,” the broker noted. “That’s when you’re just going around in circles and circles and circles.”
Department of Social Services’ spokeswoman Julia Savel did not respond to questions from The News and would not immediately provide more recent records showing how frequently people using city housing vouchers were placed into apartments.
A spokeswoman for Mayor Adams also did not respond to questions.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams called on the mayor and his administration to “swiftly address the longstanding agency bureaucracy blocking New Yorkers from permanent housing solutions that allow them to move out of shelters and into their own homes.”
“This Council is focused on investing in solutions that address New Yorkers’ top safety priority of housing, and city agencies must effectively implement these programs to make a difference for the people across our city,” she added. “We can’t push unhoused New Yorkers out of public spaces for not entering a congregate shelter system, as city agencies fail to provide the transition vouchers out of shelters for which people are eligible.”
For Bonds, who just one year ago was living a relatively normal life, her situation living in a shelter and trying to find a permanent apartment has been eye-opening.
“It’s stressful. It’s discouraging,” she said. “I feel like I’m losing the fight.”
