NYC NOW - NYC Told Supportive Housing Landlords to Stop Evictions. They’re Still Happening.

Episode Date: July 1, 2026

New York City approves a $126 billion budget that scraps a planned NYPD expansion and broadens housing assistance through a new rental voucher program. Officials also prepare for a dangerous heat wave by opening cooling centers and extending pool hours. Plus, WNYC’s Karen Yi reports on why supportive housing providers are still filing eviction cases months after the city told them to use eviction only as a last resort. -Got any questions, comments or story ideas? Send us a message at [e-mail] Photo Cred: Karen Yi, WNYC/Gothamist Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

From WNYC, this is NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. We have seen a significant number of cases that raise real alarms that the providers are simply ignoring the guidance. Legal advocacy groups say evictions of formerly homeless New Yorkers are still happening, despite the city's call for landlords to ease up. On today's episode, we look into why supportive housing providers aren't complying with city-issued guidance instructing them to only go to housing court as a last resort.

But before we get into that, here's what's happening in New York City. Mayor Zoran Mamdani and the City Council have reached a deal on a $126 billion budget for the next fiscal year. In an unexpected reversal, the budget effectively canceled a planned expansion of the NYPD. The mayor says he consulted with Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch about the cut before the final budget passed on Tuesday. Commissioner Tish and I were able to identify ways to keep the NYPD head count at the originally authorized 35,000, while also meeting all of our crime fighting needs and implementing the new programs that were announced earlier this year. Counsel Speaker Julie Minnan told WNYC that the mayor's call came at the last minute, and she is not on board. My view of this is we should have added those police officers because rapes are going up, felony assaults are going up, subway crime is going up on all three categories as well as hate crimes. are going up.

The budget will also expand city PhEPs, which functions as a local version of Section 8. People who are on the voucher pay about a third of their income towards rent, and the rest is subsidized. WMYC's Karen Yee says it's a really popular program. There's about 65,000 households that rely on the voucher, and New Yorkers can qualify if they are low income and previously had some sort of history inside the Department of Homeless Shelter System. Karen says the city PEPS program has been part of the city's strategy to get a record number of New Yorkers out of the shelter system, something they call shelter exits. It's grown so much that it's about $1.2 billion a year, and it's now the nation's largest municipal rental assistance program and the biggest housing voucher program in general after the federal Section 8 program. During the city's budget negotiations, Mayor Mumdani and the city council were at odds over city febs, with the mayor saying the program, which is a federal section 8 program, which is a federal.

just too expensive. The back and forth is what actually held up the city's budget. But Karen says this budget fight runs parallel to a legal fight, which precedes the Mumdani administration. The city council had passed a package of laws three years ago in 2023 to expand city feps to make more people eligible for it. Former Mayor Adams sued to stop this legislation from taking effect, and then it kind of sort of ping ponged its way through the court process. But it all came together at once this week, and the mayor and the city council were able to reach a compromise. They're essentially going to create a new rental assistance program in a different agency that's going to include people that are not eligible for city thefts. So that includes kind of three

main buckets of people. The first bucket includes people who are in a homeless shelter, but are not in a department of homeless shelter, like people in youth shelters. Karen says the other bucket includes people who earn slightly too much money over the federal poverty line threshold. And then she says the third group of people are folks who are in rent-stabilized units who are housed but don't have a shelter history. Karen says it's good news for low-income New Yorkers. This new housing voucher program is going to help another 5,600 households either stay in their homes or get out of shelter. So it's going to be more relief for New Yorkers who are really kind of crunched with rising rents and rising. costs overall. That's WMYC's Karen Yee, and you'll hear more from her in a moment. But in other news,

It was built for 200,000 users a day. It currently handles 650,000 users a day, including the subway. So, you know, do nothing is not an option. That's Andy Biford, also known as Train Daddy. He's leading when he says will be a $7 to $8 billion transformation of Penn Station. He's stopped by the Brian Larris show on WMYC. And he's not. didn't hold back. Penn Station, everyone agrees, is awful. It's suboptimal. It's been languishing.

We've never really addressed the demolition in the 60s. It's this suboptimal labyrinth of horrible dark corridors squeezed under Madison Square Garden. Bifert says the key design breakthrough is ripping out a whole theater buried under the station. Why? Because theaters don't have columns. And no columns means light, space, and what he describes as a great. brand new entrance on 8th Avenue. If you take that out, it does not have any columns.

It's a theater. You can't have columns obstructing the stage. So that enables you to build a fantastic entrance on 8th Avenue, but also allows light to flood in. But not everyone's on board. The MTA, which has another 160 years on its lease to run trains through parts of the station, has declined to sign on as a partner, saying doing so would harm New York transit riders. Biford says the lease has been amended. five times before, and he wants the MTA to sign on to the project.

As for the look, Bifert says think of Grand Central, but bigger. He points to blue mosaics, representing the Hudson River, a sweeping staircase, and yes, a bar underneath. But the main point I'd want to make is we add 165% more public space and end up with way more public space than Grand Central has. According to Bifert, the renderings are live at Pinn Transformation.com. And he says there's still time for the public to weigh in. Penn Station glow up error? Well, we're watching for it.

I'm going to state the obvious here. It is hot A-F. With temperatures settling into triple digits this week, our region is bracing for what could be its hottest fourth of July since 2010. Mayor Mumdani is sharing some advice that I strongly support. The single most important thing you can do in these temperatures is to stay indoors with air conditioning. Start figuring out your work and child.

care arrangements and know where you will go to stay cool. The city is opening additional cooling centers, including library branches and municipal buildings, to battle the ongoing heat wave. And if you want to cool off with a swim, public pools will stay open until 8.30 in the evening in response to the heat. Plus, pop-up cooling stations will be available throughout the city to assist outdoor workers. Last year, the City Health Department reported 19 people died from heat-related illnesses during a record-breaking June heat wave.

Be careful out there, friends. friends. We have to take a quick break, but when we return, why legal groups are calling on the Mamdani administration to pause evictions in supportive housing. That's ahead in just a minute. Stay close. Welcome back. Two months ago, New York City told supportive housing landlords to back off on evictions. But data says they're still doing it anyway. The city issued guidance to supportive housing landlords telling them to only go to housing court as a last resort and intervene early when residents fall behind on rent. But since then, landlords have sought nearly 70 eviction warrants. Those numbers come from legal services in YC, a nonprofit that began tracking eviction cases in 2024.

WNYC reporter Karen Yee has been reporting on this from the beginning. Karen, welcome to the show. Hey, Deney. Can you first tell us what supportive housing is and who it's supposed to help? Think of supportive housing as what's in its name, right? It's housing with support. It's really permanent housing meant to help some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers. So think about people who are homeless or living on the street who have another special disability, right?

So they maybe have a mental illness or a substance abuse disorder. It's also for youth aging out of foster care or victims of domestic violence. And so instead of just having a landlord, you also have a housing provider who is supposed to provide these supports, It's a combination of either case management, some counseling, some of them provide financial literacy, gatherings. They're supposed to really support tenants as they're kind of navigating being housed, some of them for the first time in many years, or helping them through their benefits. Now, if you're in support of housing, you as a tenant pay 30% of your income and the rest is subsidized by a mix of public funding. So it's very patchwork. Supportive housing gets a mix of city, state, and federal funding.

And that's why there's been so much concern about evictions in support of housing. The city pays these providers to keep people housing off the street or out of shelter. So when tenants are being taken to housing court by the organizations getting public money to house them, there's a lot of questions about why that's happening. Do we know how often evictions are happening? According to Legal Services, NYC, they're really the ones that have been tracking these cases because no one else does. Like I mentioned, it's like this patchwork of city funding, state funding. funding and federal funding, and that means there's also patchwork oversight.

So Legal Services NYC was getting a lot of clients, and they started counting the number of eviction warrants. And eviction warrants are different than eviction filings. They're sort of the precipice of eviction, like right up until the point that a marshal is going to come on your door and evict you. And per their numbers, there's been nearly 900 tenants in supportive housing that have received eviction warrants since December, 2024, and about 200. 175 of them have been evicted. And those are the numbers that have really prompted the city to step in and say, let's set some ground rules. We shouldn't really be evicting people unless it's in the most serious of cases. But that guidance doesn't seem to be sticking. And what happens to those 275 tenants? Where do they end up? Are they back in the homeless shelter? It's hard to know. I mean, like I said, these are really vulnerable New Yorkers that kind of have nowhere else to go. They're either coming from homeless shelters or coming from living off the streets after many, many years. It took a lot of work and effort to find them housing in the first place. I mean, some of them may go live with family members. Maybe some of them can get another sort of housing or rental assistance program, but many of those are ending or funding for them is being cut off. So they don't really have many options. Can you tell us a bit more about what was in the city guidance? Because I'm wondering either these providers are ignoring it or they just don't know.

So three different city agencies issued this guidance in mid-April. It was the city's health agency, social services, and housing. There's a sort of a trifecta at the local level, at least, who fund and then oversee these providers. And they, in this guidance, sort of outlined the minimal steps that housing providers need to take. before they take someone to housing court. So that includes if somebody falls behind on their rent, writing them written notices and letting them know, listen, you're falling behind your rent, finding other ways to reach them if they're not responding, maybe providing financial literacy.

You know, a lot of people aren't used to paying rent or don't know how to pay rent or sort of navigating their bank systems or navigating their benefits. A lot of these tenants actually, it's 30% of your income, but their income is disability benefits, or it's the shelter allowance under a public benefit, program, right? So in many cases, it's just that certain systems aren't talking to other systems to sort of get the money to the landlord. So the city sort of wanted to reset and say, okay, let's make sure we're doing all of these things. We're providing the support that is required before we take the step to send

somebody to eviction court. That should really only be the last resort. Okay. So the city comes up with these services that would help people pay their rent. Exactly. The support part of supportive of housing is essentially the wraparound services that are meant to keep people housed, keep people from going back to homelessness or going back to the streets again. But what housing advocates were saying is that the guidance was well-intentioned, but it didn't really have any teeth to actually force providers and landlords to comply. They wanted some of these requirements to be written into the contract so that there's a consequence, right?

You don't get your money if you don't follow these very specific rules. So on top of the lack of an enforcement mechanism, I spoke to Craig Hughes. He's a social worker with legal services NYC, and he's really been doing the work of tallying these eviction warrants. And he told me that some providers that he was working with didn't even know that this guidance existed and was out, and he was actually sending it to them. We have seen a significant number of cases that raise real alarms that the providers are simply ignoring the guidance, that in some cases they are not aware of it. We, you know, have found cases where evictions have been executed against tenants where there's just a direct correlation

where had the provider actually followed the guidance from mid-April, this tenant would never have been evicted. So because of all of this confusion around the guidance and the fact that after the guidance was issued, the eviction warrants continued. They didn't really stop. Now advocates are telling the city, can we pause all eviction cases in supportive housing for 90 days?

And this pause will give us time to make sure all the landlords and providers know that the guidance exists, but also kind of look at each individual eviction case and make sure it really was a case that wasn't preventable, right, that we can't really find other ways to help this tenant pay their rent. So that, you know, make sure that it clears that like last resort or most serious case burden. Has that 90-day pause been approved? No. City Hall sent me a statement about how the mayor is on the side of tenants and really is working to add more tenant protections and tenant rights, but wouldn't commit to a 90-day pause. And these supportive housing tenants, they're mostly formerly homeless New Yorkers, as you mentioned, Karen.

So to be clear, when these tenants fail to pay their share of the income that 30% that we talked about earlier, this data says that these housing providers are jumping straight to eviction. Why jump to eviction? I think it's a little bit more complicated than that, right? There's many, many different providers, and not all of them are issuing eviction warrants at the same rate. Some are and some aren't, right? I think in some cases, you do see providers seemingly automatically taking tenants to court when they miss two months of rent. And that can be as low as $215 a month, right? It's their share of their income that is coming in.

Sometimes you see cases where housing providers are taking tenants to court over a couple thousand dollars, right? But then you do see cases where rental arrears are very, very high. They're more than $10,000. And, you know, what supportive housing providers have told me is that rental arrears since the pandemic have just really, really skyrocketed. And they also need that money. They need tenants to pay rent so that they can use that money to provide the services and to keep the building going and keep it maintained. Right. And so what providers tell me is like, look, rent is part of the deal.

We do provide services and we're trying to help tenants. but there are some tenants that just don't want to engage with us. So what other recourse do we have? And then the other thing they mentioned is that in many of these cases, the tenants aren't working, right? So it's not their own income that they have to use to pay their rent, but rather it's a public benefit, right? And so sometimes the city is late on providing that benefit. And so it's a matter of the city also kind of streamlining its process to get those payments out. And then there is this like emergency rental assistance program that can have.

help tenants that are in severe arrears, right, facing a couple thousand dollars in rent that they're owed. And supportive housing landlords tell me, look, if we file an eviction case, it kind of moves that application to the top of the pile, right? It's not policy and the city has told me multiple times. This is not policy. But in practice, landlords say this is sort of what works, right? It works to sort of get that tenant the help they need by putting them through housing court. Now housing advocates have refuted this and said, no, there's like better ways we can all communicate without having to put a tenant through the trouble and the exhaustion of going through eviction court.

And the trauma, you know? Yeah, absolutely. Even as the city is trying to keep people in these apartments, the federal government may be pulling the funding that marks them as possible in the first place. Karen, you've been reporting on how the Trump administration is overhauling its largest homeless assistance program. What does that mean for New Yorkers? That's right.

I sort of mentioned how supportive housing gets a mix of federal state and city funding. So what we're talking about and what's under threat here is the federal piece. And what Trump's Department of Housing and Urban Development, this is HUD, they've announced that they want to make radical changes to how they distribute money because they're saying it hasn't worked, right? They sort of point to these street homelessness numbers and they say if the way this program was funded was working, we wouldn't have these record number of homeless Americans. I spoke to Rebecca Zangan. She's the chief policy officer with the supportive housing network of New York. And she told me that people prioritized by the continuum of care program, which is these federal funds that are under threat, are folks who are most at risk of returning to homelessness. When a full-time minimum wage job cannot afford you a median rent apartment where you live, the expectation that people can live without any government assistance is unreasonable.

What HUD has said, as they've sort of revamped how they want to fund this program next year, is they want to tackle homelessness's root causes, better steward taxpayer dollars and help Americans achieve self-sufficiency. Self-sufficiency. What do you mean by that? So what's interesting here is that HUD has actually redefined what self-sufficiency means. And they actually, in there, they issued this request for funding proposals for next year, essentially asking providers to submit your program, description and we'll decide whether we fund you again. And in this request, they actually use an Oxford and Miriam Webster dictionary definition of self-sufficiency, which is the ability of someone to meet their basic needs without any public or private assistance. And this is a change from previous policy where in the past self-sufficiency could mean you could live independently, but you were also getting assistance. And so Rebecca Zangan, who comes from this group of

supportive housing providers, she says this is now a much higher standard to meet, especially in a city as expensive as New York. With this change in how HUD is going to fund this continuum of care program, it could mean a cut of $66 million for New York City, which would strip funding for about 2,800 formerly homeless households. And part of the shift that HUD wants to do here is take away money from long-term housing programs and shifted instead to short-term housing. housing programs that are max out at two years and instead fund more treatment programs because, again, they want to address what they say is the root cause of homelessness, you know, which they say is mental illness, substance abuse disorder, et cetera.

So what's next? What do you expect from these programs in the next few years? If we zoom out a little bit, the trend here is that the federal government has really retreated from subsidizing affordable housing and it's largely been left to the city to fill in those gaps. And now we see with these changes that we've talked about about the continuum of care funding, the federal government again redirecting money away from like long-term housing. And I think one of the other changes that supportive housing tenants have flagged for me is that what HUD is changing is they're also kind of setting up this rubric of who they want to prioritize to get federal money next year.

And that rubric is going to reward programs that the Trump administration values, such as programs that don't do harm reduction, programs that require treatment before getting housing like sobriety rules or work rules. And so the concern is not just the amount of funding that the programs will lose and the city will lose, but also how these programs might shift and change in order to get some of that federal money and keep some of that federal money. And where that puts us, right, how that sort of changes the way the city provides services to really vulnerable New Yorkers and houses really vulnerable New Yorkers. That's WMYC's Karen. Thanks a lot, Karen. Thanks, Jane. Thanks a lot, Karen. Thanks,

And thank you for listening to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre. See you next time.