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A recent change to how the city approves CityFHEPS vouchers, aimed at saving money on rent, required additional review by state and city agencies—extending an already-protracted application process that sometimes causes shelter residents to lose out on apartments.
236 days.
That’s how long, on average, it took someone living in a Department of Homeless Services shelter to find and move into an apartment with a city housing voucher this year, according to Social Services Commissioner Erin Dalton, who shared the numbers for the first time recently.
It’s a sign of just how challenging New York City’s housing market is for low income renters. Tens of thousands of households spend the better part of a year searching for housing even after they get their City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) housing voucher.
The vouchers, which pay a portion of a participant’s rent, can be challenging to use, principally because of the difficulty in finding an apartment that will take them amidst a citywide housing shortage, as well as discrimination against voucher holders—which is illegal, but still common.
Even when voucher holders do find apartments, processing delays sometimes jeopardize their move out, keeping people in the crowded shelter system as they wait to be approved.
“I don’t want to ever ever go through this in my life again,” said Roberto Garcia, who moved into an apartment in East Harlem in August using his CityFHEPS voucher. He said delays processing his application held the process up for months.
The City Council, which just fought City Hall to fund an expansion of rental vouchers, is putting pressure on the administration to implement reforms to make the approval process easier, some of which the Department of Social Services (DSS) says it has already started.
Savings measure has ‘unintended impact‘
When Mayor Zohran Mamdani was trying to balance his budget in June, he announced half a million dollars in “savings” to the CityFHEPS program, which allows participants to pay 30 percent of their income in rent, with the city picking up the rest.
One way to save, budget head Sherif Soliman said at the time, was implementing a “rent reasonableness” test—checking that rents are in line with federal standards and the state’s rent stabilization laws—to ensure the city isn’t overpaying for apartments. That rent review, Soliman suggested, would help save money on the voucher program, which has grown to be the second largest in the country at over 70,000 households.
But Garcia, 62, who was living in a Greenpoint shelter this summer, said the rent review delayed his application, prolonging his stay.
Garcia found an apartment in mid-April, his advocate told City Limits. The apartment was inspected in May. Then in June, he applied and went through a few rounds of back and forth with DSS about the application.
In July, his advocate at VOCAL-NY said that the application was further delayed because of the rent reasonableness policy, citing an email from a case manager at Adult Protective Services describing the new requirement. In August, he was still waiting for a check to be sent to the landlord, until he finally moved in near the end of the month.
The tradeoff between cost and service has created an awkward position for Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has touted “public efficiency” to better serve New Yorkers, but also faced a large budget deficit his first year in office. The CityFHEPS program has grown more than fivefold since 2021, to over $2 billion.
A spokesperson for City Hall said that the prior administration had under-budgeted the program, forcing current leadership to “confront an unsustainable fiscal trajectory.”
“Rent reasonableness is an important part of making sure public dollars are used responsibly, but it is only one piece of our broader effort to make CityFHEPS sustainable,” said Spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach in a statement. “We are connecting voucher holders to good jobs, investing in one-shot deals that help tenants resolve rental arrears before they enter shelter, and moving aggressively to reduce our reliance on costly hotel shelters.”
Earlier this year, the mayor reneged on a campaign promise to settle a City Council lawsuit against the administration for not implementing an expensive CityFHEPS expansion, passed by lawmakers in 2023. (The mayor eventually struck a deal with the Council in June to create a much smaller, hard-capped voucher program, run through the city’s housing agency, that will serve part of the population targeted by the expansion.)
Then, under pressure from the governor to scale back spending on vouchers, the mayor proposed a $500 million cut to CityFHEPS in his executive budget, with scant details of what the “savings and efficiencies” would mean for the voucher program.
But now some housing groups say that the rent reasonableness reviews caused additional delays.
“While we support the City taking measures to save costs, the process itself, which took 48-72 hours previously, has added months to the CityFHEPS application review process,” wrote shelter provider Women In Need (Win) in testimony to the City Council last month. “Win internal data found that it took an average of 53 days for the Department of Social Services to complete this process, with negligible overcharges if any at all.”
The Department of Social Services (DSS)—which oversees both the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) and the Human Resources Administration (HRA)—said that it made a change this month so part of the check can be done after a tenant moves in.
Once someone is deemed eligible for CityFHEPS, they get a “shopping letter”—a document that outlines how much a household’s voucher is worth. It’s only after they find an apartment willing to take their voucher that they formally apply. The city has made progress at reducing application processing times, taking about 25 days on average in the most recent fiscal year that ended in June, down from 28 days the year before.
But some cases get caught up in administrative snags, like recalculating a participant’s income, or an apartment that fails inspection. Some brokers and landlords say they can’t afford to wait, forgoing rent while the city processes a voucher application. When they pull an apartment, voucher holders have to restart their search.
“They scheduled the moving date for June, but then the caseworker made a mistake, and so the HRA with the paperwork for the landlord’s information was incorrect, so that delayed two more months: June, July, August, and then I finally moved into the end of August,” said Garcia.
The rent review requires a data match to the state Department of Homes and Community Renewal’s (HCR) list of rent stabilized apartments, followed by a check of comparable apartments in the area.
City Hall did not provide an estimate of how much money the rent reasonableness checks are expected to save, but said they have seen a decline in the average subsidy for new placements.
In September, DSS updated its policy to “streamline the review of rental units and reduce delays in the rental process.” Prior to the change, according to a DSS memo shared with providers in April, the rent reviews were to be completed before an application can be submitted, and could take up to three weeks.
The new rules allow the HCR rent review to happen simultaneously for rent stabilized units, which DSS said they expect will cut pre-clearance time for those apartments while still allowing the city to recoup overcharges after the lease starts. But for market rate units, the process will remain the same.
“We did roll that out in the late spring with very good intentions,” HRA Administrator Scott French testified during a recent Council hearing. “We did understand and see an unanticipated impact of rolling that out, especially as it relates to the rent-regulated aspect and the engagement with HCR on legal rents that it did add to the pre-clearance and clearance process.”
Inspecting the inspections
For some, delays at other steps in the application process, including clearing a unit for move-in, can end up costing them the apartment.
Jaqueline Lloyd said she spent two years and seven months in shelter after she left an abusive relationship in 2023.
She found an apartment that would take her voucher, but then needed it to pass a habitability inspection from the city. It failed, and needed repairs for small issues with the electrical outlets and one of the doors.
Lloyd extended her shelter stay for weeks, she said, waiting for a new inspection. When things got delayed, her paperwork, which was good for four months, expired (the city has since extended the life of the eligibility documents to six months). She had to resubmit all her paperwork, delaying her further.
“The package is like 75 pages long, and if you make one error, they kick it back, and it takes you another six weeks, minimum six weeks for that to go through again,” said Lloyd. “That’s the part that is really, really, really baffling and hard.”
In the meantime, the landlord of the unit she’d found rented the apartment to someone else.
“[Landlords are] not going to wait months and months for the voucher to get approved. So, you know, maybe the inspection gets delayed, and then they find an issue, and then that results in some other document timing out,” said Laura Lazarus, the CEO of Anthos Home, an organization that works to help tenants and landlords with voucher move-ins.
Speeding up the inspections process is one reform that Lazarus said could be a “win-win”—tenants move in faster, landlords get their checks, and the agency reduces its workload. Her organization helps conduct inspections and pay for quick fixes in some apartments to speed up the process.
Inspections can fail for very simple issues, Lazarus said, like missing outlet covers or window guards, or water temperatures that fall just outside a very tight range.
The inspections are done by a mix of private and nonprofit partners, but the trickiest are done by DSS staff. According to the agency’s data, most apartments that DSS inspected required more than one inspection, with an average of 1.7 inspections per apartment.
Councilmember Gale Brewer introduced a bill this month that she says would streamline the voucher process and get people into their new homes faster.
The bill would distinguish between “minor” and “major” repair issues, allowing some of the simpler fixes to be resolved with photo or video evidence, rather than waiting for a re-inspection.
“You go back to the shelter, and then you wait and you wait and you wait, and until the owner supposedly fixes really minor issues,” said Brewer. “It’s hard on all levels. It’s hard for the family. It’s hard for the social worker.”
Testifying about the bill, Social Services Commissioner Erin Dalton said that the agency is already piloting similar reforms, including having partner agencies conduct most inspections and leaving just the most complex cases for DSS. It also distinguishes between major and minor problems and expedites some re-inspections, Dalton said.
But the agency still didn’t support the bill. DSS said it has to balance maintaining good habitability standards with efficiency.
“While unintended, if adopted as drafted, this bill would limit our flexibility, increase burden and time to process, and require the addition of many more HRA inspectors and inspections,” said Dalton.
It’s a common debate for the Council, which often legislates additional reporting requirements that can stretch some agencies thin.
“But I think in this case, where the most vulnerable people are being hurt by a crazy system, it would be helpful to know how they’re being hurt,” said Brewer.
DSS said it hoped to roll out the improvements from the pilot to the whole system in early 2027.
Other reforms
Despite some of the recent changes, the process can still get delayed by small administrative issues, according to Phyllis Curry, a housing specialist with Housing Works, who works with HRA on voucher applications.
“Everybody has the same thing: delay, delay, delay,” said Curry. “From the time a client sees an apartment to the time they cut the check for the apartment—it is a four to six months process,” Curry added. “That’s unacceptable.”
Testifying to the Council last month, Department of Social Services officials were optimistic that they could build on reforms to rent reasonableness and inspections to bring down processing times—and weren’t sure if they needed the help of more City Council legislation.
The average time between when a household is deemed eligible for a voucher and moving out was 236 days in the most recent fiscal year, up from the year prior, when it was 221, but down from the year before, when it took 244 days on average.
Under the Eric Adams administration, officials had refused to release numbers on search times and were critical of a state comptroller report that said it could take up to 10 months. Another bill from Councilmember Brewer would require the agency to report the figure annually, something Dalton questioned, saying the time to place clients varies widely based on their needs.
Another bill from Brewer would require DSS to respond to all voucher applications within 15 days. Garcia and Lloyd told City Limits that one of the biggest holdups was not being able to tell the status of their application, and needing to go back and forth with case managers and administrators over small issues.
Two other bills introduced by Councilmember Lincoln Restler and Frank Morano, respectively, would require DSS to pay landlords the upcoming month’s rent seven days before the end of the prior month, and create a portal for landlords to view payments and documents.
Officials said they were working on a landlord portal but would not be able to have it fully functional by next year, as the bill mandates.
Voucher holders and advocates rallied outside City Hall in late September, urging city leaders to take action.
“Just because something is available doesn’t mean it’s accessible,” said Lylens Lubin, a community organizer with Women In Need.
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