After pledging millions of dollars to crack down on landlords and brokers who reject apartment applicants based on how they pay the rent, the city has delayed the rollout of its enforcement plan and slashed funding for a program meant to stop housing discrimination.
Mayor Eric Adams announced last year that the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development would award an outside group $3.1 million to identify and penalize landlords who violate New York law by denying tenant applicants because they use government aid to pay rent. The plan would also help the city place more families in homes, Adams said when announcing the funding in March 2023.
But budget documents show that the Adams administration has yet to issue the contract to enforce the anti-discrimination laws and has instead cut a quarter of the funding it touted in a press release 15 months ago. The delay comes as roughly 11,000 households living in city shelters have rental assistance vouchers but can’t find apartments amid an increasing affordable housing shortage. The backlog persists as the city grapples with near record-high homelessness, according to shelter data, though officials are planning to release thousands of additional federal housing subsidies to low-income tenants.
City Hall spokesperson William Fowler said the housing department intends to pick a contractor for the anti-discrimination initiative later this year. He did not say why the process has been taking so long or why the funding was decreased.
“Key to ensuring Section 8 vouchers and other rental assistance programs are functional is testing and enforcing New York City’s source of income protections — which is why a year ago we announced that we would be increasing efforts to do so,” Fowler said.
Low-income renters and their advocates say “source-of-income discrimination," which has been illegal in New York since 2008, remains rampant across the five boroughs. Brooklyn resident Qunesha Byrd said she and her four children have routinely run into the problem as they search for an apartment.
Byrd, 36, said her family has been staying with a relative in a two-bedroom apartment in Bedford-Stuyvesant while she undergoes cancer treatment but they have to leave by the end of July. She said they have a rental assistance voucher through the CityFHEPS program that would cover up to $3,777 a month in rent.
Byrd added that she’s been visiting apartments and contacting multiple brokers daily. She said most stopped responding to her after she revealed she has a housing voucher.
“One didn’t take my info, name, number or anything,” said Byrd. “He just hung up the phone after I told him I had a voucher.”
She said three brokers explicitly told her that the landlords don’t take “programs,” a common term for subsidies including federal Section 8 and city-backed CityFHEPS vouchers. Others said the apartments were already leased, even though they still appeared on websites and apps for rental listings.
“When I’m looking for an apartment, I feel like all hope is lost when they say it’s leased already," Byrd said. "So why is it online? Why is it on the app if it’s leased already?"
"I feel like they’re playing games because I have a voucher," she added.
Black and Latino New Yorkers, people with disabilities and households headed by women account for the vast majority of voucher recipients in the Section 8 and CityFHEPS programs. People with rental assistance face a severe housing shortage that makes finding an affordable unit extremely difficult. In addition to negative stereotypes about voucher recipients, landlords say they hesitate to accept the subsidies because of stringent inspection requirements or administrative obstacles that can delay payments.
The commitment that Mayor Adams announced last year was supposed to tackle the discrimination problem by hiring an outside vendor to perform phone and field testing — a practice where trained staff pose as apartment-hunters with or without vouchers to gauge broker responses and suss out scofflaws.
“If you tell a potential tenant that you don't accept Section 8 vouchers or other rental assistance, guess what?” Adams said in his 2023 State of the City speech. “That tenant may be an actor hired by the city and we're going to take enforcement actions against you.”
Last fiscal year, the city’s Commission on Human Rights completed just 31 source-of-income discrimination tests, down from 48 the year before and 53 in the 2021 fiscal year, according to the commission’s three most recent annual reports. Commission administrators said at a City Council hearing in March that the number of staff members handling source-of-income discrimination complaints had increased but the number of staff testing whether landlords were complying with city and state laws had dropped from four to three.
The agency did not respond to multiple inquiries from Gothamist about how many source-of-income discrimination tests it has performed so far this year.
After announcing the funding last year, the city seemed close to fulfilling its pledge to ramp up testing. In April 2023, the housing department issued a $5,000 contract to the watchdog organization Housing Rights Initiative and renewed it over the next three months for a total of $20,000, or less than 1% of the money earmarked for the enforcement effort, according to the city comptroller's Checkbook NYC database.
Fowler, the City Hall spokesperson, said HRI conducted 182 tests and found 26 likely instances of source-of-income discrimination through the four-month “pilot program.” He said the organization referred the findings to the Commission on Human Rights, “resulting in multiple complaints filed against landlords, realtors, and brokers, and cease-and-desist letters mandating additional training for violating entities and their agents.”
But after that, the effort stalled.
Aaron Carr, HRI's executive director, said his organization is now bidding on the contract. The group has initiated sweeping lawsuits against major real estate companies accused of discrimination.
In January, a spending plan from the mayor's Office of Management and Budget showed that delaying the program would save the city $770,000 as part of a citywide cost-cutting initiative. In April, the city’s housing agency issued documents stating that it intended to award two contracts worth a combined $2.3 million, a quarter less than the the original proposal touted by the Adams administration.
Jessica Valencia, cofounder of the anti-discrimination organization UnlockNYC, said the lack of follow-through made the March 2023 announcement seem like a mere “PR stunt” designed to give the impression that the administration was taking action to stop brokers and landlords from rejecting tenants who use rental assistance.
“It looks good on paper, but in reality, what happened to this initiative?” she said. “It’s odd because they made a big splash about this."
New Yorkers trying to leave shelters and secure affordable apartments continue to face discrimination, with little accountability for law-breaking brokers and landlords, according to Robert Desir, an attorney with the nonprofit Legal Aid Society.
“Without aggressive enforcement, people are going to face denials,” said Desir. “We really need a concerted, focused effort on this problem. It's pretty large-scale.”
