A housing voucher system is one of the main tools the city has to help record numbers of homeless individuals and families move out of shelters and into independent housing. It can also prevent families from becoming homeless in the first place.
While the de Blasio administration’s vouchers have moved tens of thousands of people from shelters into apartments, the program faces challenges. Though voucher discrimination—and lagging efforts to fight that—are significant obstacles, the main issue for a person or family seeking to use the CityFHEPS (Fighting Homelessness & Eviction Prevention Supplement) voucher might be the amount.
At $1,236 for an individual or $1,303 for a two-person household, the city’s voucher for homeless and at-risk individuals struggles to keep up with New York City’s overheating housing market.
Individuals seeking to use the CityFHEPS voucher—and the housing assistants at community organizations throughout the city trying to help them—face a steep challenge.
“The housing stock at that price point is brutal,” says Annie Carforo, campaign manager with Neighbors Together, a Bed-Stuy organization that helps homeless individuals find housing, among many other things.
“We can’t even make calls and get discriminated against,” she says.
There were 59,476 homeless individuals in shelter as of September 9. 16,355 were single adults.
According to the New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey, in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, there were 16,480 units for rent for less than $1249 per month—roughly one for each homeless adult.
Between 2014 and 2017, apartments available for under $1,249 decreased by more than 14,000 units, a 47 percent drop. It’s likely that since 2017, units available for rent under $1,259 have dropped even further.
If there are 16,355 vacant low-rent apartments out there, they are nearly impossible to find. A search for apartments under $1,250 on the listing site Zillow returned just 100 apartments for rent at or under that amount. On Apartments.com, there were 60. On Street Easy, there were only three.