By Forum Staff
Mayor Eric Adams on Tuesday announced further innovations to the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS) rental assistance program that will expand access to housing for New Yorkers with housing vouchers. While the City continues to face a serious housing shortage with a record-high shelter population totaling more than 113,000, CityFHEPS voucher holders will now be able to utilize their voucher to obtain permanent, affordable housing not only within the five boroughs but also in any county or locality across the Empire State.
New York City’s severe housing shortage has been one of the greatest impediments to the administration’s efforts to connect New Yorkers experiencing homelessness or housing insecurity to stable, affordable housing, as less than 1 percent of apartments with rents below $1,500 are currently available for new tenants — the lowest in 30 years. As a result, thousands of households with housing vouchers are currently living in shelter, unable to find permanent, affordable housing.
As the Adams administration enters the second year of responding, largely alone, to a global humanitarian crisis, and the federal government declines to implement the national decompression strategy Adams has urged for months, solutions such as the one Adams announced on Tuesday are critical to the City’s efforts to quickly move more New Yorkers from shelter into permanent housing and make additional space available for tens of thousands of asylum seekers, as well as the large population of longtime homeless New Yorkers.
Boosting the number of households able to move out of city shelters and into permanent housing has become increasingly urgent as more than 116,000 people seeking asylum in the United States have come through the city’s care seeking shelter since spring 2022, with hundreds more arriving each day, often without existing support systems and in need of temporary housing assistance. Though the city has continued to lead on this national crisis without the proper support necessary from its partners, this unprecedented influx has severely strained the city’s capacity to provide a temporary place to stay for those who need it. Before this crisis began, the New York City Department of Homeless Services shelter census was approximately 45,000 people, down from a previous peak of about 61,000. Today, the total number of individuals in the city’s care, including both longtime unhoused New Yorkers and asylum seekers stands at more than 113,000 — more than doubling in just over a year.
“Our shelters are far past capacity, but thousands of households still remain left stuck without any affordable housing options across the five boroughs. Now is the time to create new options for permanent affordable housing for New Yorkers by expanding CityFHEPS even further than this administration did earlier this year,” Adams said. “These reforms will give longtime New Yorkers the ability to move out of our city’s shelter system to other parts of the state with more affordable housing options, while simultaneously opening up space in our city’s shelter system for the approximately 10,000 migrants who continue to arrive in the city seeking shelter month after month. We hope our partners across the state will greet these longtime New Yorkers with open arms and good job opportunities.”
