Landlords are illegally refusing city vouchers from homeless people

 

NY1

 

It’s been more than a year since Rebeka and her family lost their apartment in Queens. Since January 2020, they have been living in a hotel — a hotel operating as a homeless shelter for families.

"This whole year has been different," Rebeka explains. "Christmas, New Year's, Thanksgiving, everything is just different."

She has two children and worked for the city until the pandemic hit the five boroughs. NY1 has changed her name to protect her family's privacy.

When we met on a cold day in December, Rebeka was carrying a large stack of papers. On it was the names and phone numbers of management companies and realtors.

"This is a prospective list that I was given by my shelter," she said. "And this is what I have been doing, making calls. I also do social media."

 Rebeka was given a list of management companies and buildings from her shelter provider that are supposed to accept her voucher. She called one of them, only to be told they only accepted Section 8. 
 

Her family’s only path out of shelter is a voucher from the city — a path that all too often is a dead end.

She calls a management company based in Long Island City.

  On the other end, they ask: "Do you have a Section 8 voucher? Are you looking for affordable housing?"

Rebeka replies: "I currently have CityFHEPS." 

"We don’t accept that here," replies the management company. It’s an exchange that is repeated again and again for Rebeka.

 Rebeka calls a realtor about an apartment in Brooklyn. He says they have income and credit requirements. 

"He is looking for 650 credit and he is also looking for about $45,000 to $50,000 annually," a realtor tells Rebeka. 

"Wait, so is he accepting vouchers at this time?" she asks.

"I sent him a message and he hasn’t gotten back to me," the realtor replies. Then he hangs up.

There are thousands of people in the city’s shelter system desperately searching for housing with the city’s rental assistance voucher known as CityFHEPS. It’s a voucher program started in October of 2018 aimed at getting people in shelter back on their feet.

A NY1 investigation found these vouchers are routinely rejected by landlords — some refusing to rent to people coming from the shelter system — discrimination that is illegal but nonetheless appears to plague the system.

The city has issued thousands of eligibility letters to homeless people to show landlords that they can use the voucher to get an apartment. But statistics exclusively obtained by NY1 show just a fraction of these families actually get housing every month.

For the first 10 months of 2019, on average every month, about 4,118 families with children in shelter had an eligibility letter to entice landlords into the voucher program. On average in that time period, only about 178 of those families found an apartment every month — a tiny slice of those potentially eligible.

Since it started in October 2018, the city says a significant number of households exit shelter and enter permanent housing every year with CityFHEPS. Through September 2020, 6,490 households have moved into an apartment.