‘I Was Ghosted, Degraded’: Bills Seek to Combat Discrimination Against Rental Vouchers

Legislation introduced in the City Council this week would toughen penalties against landlords and brokers who refuse to rent to tenants using rental subsidies—a practice known as Source of Income discrimination, which is illegal but still pervasive.

A few years ago, Jasmine Smith says she was living in a domestic violence shelter in Brooklyn when she received a City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement voucher, also known as CityFHEPS.

The city-run program provides rental assistance for low-income New Yorkers experiencing or at risk of homelessness; in most cases, voucher holders pay around 30 percent of their income towards rent, and the subsidy covers the rest.

“I thought the hard part was over,” Smith, a leader with the housing advocacy group Neighbors Together, said during a rally outside of City Hall Wednesday. But finding a unit where she could use her voucher wasn’t so easy.

“I was ghosted, degraded, and told my voucher wasn’t accepted, leaving me and my children in the shelter for 11 months before I was able to find an apartment willing to accept my voucher,” Smith told the crowd.

Source of income discrimination, as the practice is known, has been illegal in New York City since 2008, meaning building owners aren’t allowed to reject a tenant just because they use a rental subsidy. But it still happens: the city’s Commission on Human Rights counts it as among the most common types of housing discrimination it sees.

Legislation introduced in the City Council this week seeks to change that by, among other things, toughening penalties against landlords and brokers who refuse to rent to voucher holders.

“We know the stories too well of tenants who are turned away from apartments because they are on a voucher, because they have Section 8, because they have a public benefit,” said Councilmember Shekar Krishnan, a former housing lawyer who represents Jackson Heights, Elmhurst and Woodside who sponsored the package of six bills.

One proposal would add source of income discrimination to the list of bad behaviors covered by the Certificate of No Harassment program, which allows the city to deny building and construction permits to building owners with a history of harassing tenants.

Another bill would increase the maximum civil penalty for someone who fails to comply with an order from Commission on Human Rights, while another would base fines for landlords who commit source of income discrimination on the size of their real estate portfolio—the more properties they own, the steeper the penalty.

The latter is aimed at large corporate landlords, which a 2024 report identified as the most common culprits for source of income complaints. “So that landlords stop discriminating as a cost of doing business,” Krishnan said. “If you do it, you will be held accountable.”

The lawmaker’s other proposals include banning credit history requirements for voucher holders, requiring that apartment applicants be notified if they’re turned down for a unit based on a tenant screening report, and publicly disclosing the building owners that are found guilty of source of income discrimination.

“Our civil rights laws, they’re not going to be worth more than the paper they’re written on unless they are enforced in reality, unless we have teeth and enforcement behind them,” Krishnan said.

In a city of ever-increasing rents, rental vouchers can be a key tool in helping households move from the shelter system to permanent housing. As of December, nearly 52,000 households were using CityFHEPS, officials testified at a Council hearing earlier this year.

The program has also been criticized for late payments to property owners and having too many regulatory requirements, which landlords say discourage its use. Officials also point to the city’s current historic housing shortage as one of the reasons vouchers are so difficult to use, saying there just aren’t enough affordable apartments to go around.

At Wednesday’s rally in support of the new bills, Smith said she was eventually able to find an apartment in the Bronx to take her CityFHEPS subsidy, and has been there for the last three years.

“It wasn’t easy. Brokers and landlords told me my voucher wasn’t enough, that I would still be required to make 40 times the rent to qualify for whatever apartment I was looking for,” she said. “Brokers need to stop using this tactic as a way to not rent to someone, because this is how New York City ended up with over 40,000 children staying in shelters.”

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