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NYC’s Commission on Human Rights investigates landlords and real estate brokers who discriminate against rental voucher holders. The agency is already understaffed, sources say.
The NYC Commission on Human Rights—the agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws that protect against employment, disability, and housing discrimination—saw its budget line shrink in Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s executive budget proposal, published earlier this month.
The cuts would reduce the already slim agency’s budget by 6 percent and slash its headcount by eight full time employees. The Commission on Human Rights had a 23 percent vacancy rate as of March, according to officials who testified before the City Council.
The mayor has been scrounging to close a significant budget deficit with the help of some state aid. While the administration pledged no significant cuts to city services, reductions to the City’s Commission on Human Rights (CCHR) in Mandani’s executive budget are deeper, even, than in his preliminary budget proposal, after an Office of Management and Budget order to cut vacancies in half.
Former employees of the agency were puzzled by the move, which comes as the mayor steps up other enforcement actions, like cracking down on “bad landlords” and touting big settlements for worker protections. They say the cuts come as they were hopeful the agency would finally be able to fully staff up under the new administration.
Among other responsibilities, CCHR investigates discrimination against rental voucher holders, who are sometimes denied access to housing because landlords consider them less desirable tenants, despite their ability to pay rent with the voucher.
While “source of income” discrimination has been illegal in New York City since 2008, tenants who use rental vouchers say it’s still common.
“I was very disappointed, because I know the impact that CCHR has,” said Nailah Abdul-Mubdi, a city housing voucher holder who lives in Brooklyn.
She said the agency helped her secure housing by intervening against landlords who discriminated against her while she was apartment hunting in 2020.
“[Mamdani] cut funding to CCHR with no recourse, and not only that, I don’t really think he understands voucher holders’ experience of source of income discrimination, and how it keeps New Yorkers homeless,” Abdul-Mubdi said.
Persistent vacancies
While the executive budget wouldn’t cut any current CCHR staff, the agency’s persistent staffing issues make it vulnerable to cost-cutting vacancy reductions—roles that advocates say should be filled instead of eliminated.
While CCHR could still make new hires to fill some vacancies, they’d be capped at 132 employees for the fiscal year that starts in July, and 124 in subsequent years—up from their current 109 staffers but down from the 141 proposed in the mayor’s preliminary budget.
Former officials said that the agency’s work in housing and labor markets, on behalf of New Yorkers who likely can’t afford legal services themselves, is essential because the casework isn’t lucrative enough to attract the business of private attorneys.
It also comes as the Trump administration seeks to dismantle much of the federal government’s fair housing enforcement efforts. Amid a federal immigration crackdown, immigrants might also be hesitant to report discrimination to federal enforcement agencies, advocates said, making the city’s system even more important.
“CCHR is a necessary element of an affordable city. It’s how you make sure people with vouchers can use them. It’s how you move people out of the shelter system. It’s how you make sure that landlords won’t say ‘We’ll report you to ICE,’” said Rebekah Cook-Mack, a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society.
Housing discrimination can be hard to pin down, but the nonprofit Unlock NYC documented at least 2,200 reports throughout the five boroughs between 2018 and 2022. The commission received over 600 complaints of source of income discrimination in 2025, according to the group’s annual report, one of the largest categories of complaints, officials testified Wednesday.
In 2022, City Limits reported that CCHR’s unit working on voucher discrimination had no full time staff.
“When landlords see that the agency to enforce those things is underfunded, they’re going to roll the dice,” said Paul Keefe, the vice president of legal services at the Community Service Society.*
In December, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli released a report that highlighted significant delays in CCHR’s processing of housing discrimination cases, finding that it took over two years to resolve a group of 29 complaints.
The agency disputed some of those findings and said that several factors lead to long case resolution times, including: “staff time and expertise, staff workloads, case complexity, and uncooperative or unresponsive parties.”
The agency did not respond to detailed questions from City Limits, deferring comment to City Hall. In a statement, a spokesperson for the mayor said Mamdani and CCHR Commissioner Christine Clarke “are confronting longstanding backlogs and overhauling the agency.”
“Every available resource will be focused on enforcing human rights protections, holding bad actors accountable, and ensuring New Yorkers can move through this city with dignity, opportunity, and equal protection under the law,” the spokesperson said.
City Hall pointed to other efforts the administration has made to staff up city government, including eliminating a rule that said agencies could only hire one new staffer for every two who left.
People familiar with the work CCHR does on housing discrimination say that there are two critical roles the agency plays: immediate response and deterrence, as well as longer term casework.
Abdul-Mubdi said she had a frustrating two to three year search for an apartment, where she was repeatedly ghosted by brokers after she told them she had a voucher.
CCHR’s intervention—where they sent testers to brokers and landlords to catch people discriminating—was critical in getting her Brooklyn apartment, she said.
Several years later, in 2023, CCHR also secured penalties against the landlords and brokers in Abdul-Mudbdi’s case.
“As an outsider who files cases there, I have not seen evidence of my case moving at any pace that would be reasonable for somebody who’s facing homelessness or the permanent loss of a voucher or a housing opportunity due to discrimination,” said Stephanie Rudolph, a lawyer and former head of the agency’s Source of Income Discrimination Unit.
How might the cut affect the agency’s work?
In the executive budget, the agency sees an additional drop off in forecasted funding in future fiscal years, in part due to a one-time program to eliminate the gap from fiscal year 2026. But it also slashes CCHR’s headcount by an additional eight positions starting in June 2027.
Meanwhile, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protections saw its budget increase under Mamdani’s plan. The department investigates labor issues like scheduling and wage theft, but doesn’t investigate discrimination cases—work that falls to the Commission on Human Rights.
In March, Officials testified that the agency’s staffing issues stemmed from hiring rules implemented by the Eric Adams administration and structural delays with hiring that caused them to lose candidates. Salaries for CCHR’s lawyers also aren’t competitive enough, they said: starting pay is approximately $83,000 a year, low for the industry and lower than other legal positions at other city agencies.
CCHR had the most vacancies in attorney positions, officials said.
Agency head Clarke testified in March they had hoped to staff up to their full previous budget line of 141 employees, up from 109 currently.
“If the two-for-one hiring freeze is ended with no vacancy reductions—meaning that we’re able to hire up to the full number—that would have an extremely positive impact on our ability to do the things that we do,” she said at the time.
But Mamdani’s budget plan wouldn’t see them reach that 141 headcount. Nevertheless, the administration says they are overhauling the department by changing how they handle complaints and simplifying the intake process.
“We certainly could do a better job with more budget, reaching more people faster, that’s just math, but we will do a substantially better job than we’ve done in the past with whatever we’re given,” testified Clarke Wednesday at the agency’s executive budget hearing.
But it still looks like a case of doing more with less, which can be challenging, former agency employees said. “Case loads go up, and it’s demoralizing,” said Cook-Mack.
CCHR also had its portfolio expanded many times in the last decade, sources said. Last year, its scope expanded again with the enforcement of the Fair Chance for Housing act, which seeks to prevent discrimination against people with past involvement in the criminal justice system.
The Human Rights Law Working Group, made up of legal and advocacy professionals in the field, said they had been hoping for an increase in funding for the agency.
“Our group was advocating for an additional $10 million in this upcoming fiscal year budget, so we definitely didn’t want to see any cuts, and we’re asking for more,” said Amy Blumsack, director of organizing and policy at Neighbors Together.
Nicole Salk, another member of the working group, testified in March that CCHR had less than half the staff it did under Mayor David Dinkins.
Councilmember Crystal Hudson said Wednesday that the agency would incur an almost $2 million cut under the executive budget.
“For a small agency that is saving as much money as you are and winning damages and penalties and restitution in the amount of over $2 million, I think the loss of that funding is perhaps misplaced,” she said.
*CSS is among City Limits’ funders.
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