For the first time in 15 years, thousands of people who cannot afford to live in New York City may be able to get financial help through a highly sought-after federal program.
Then they will face another obstacle: the city’s scarcity of apartments.
The New York City Housing Authority on Monday reopened a waiting list for housing choice vouchers, a federally funded program also known as Section 8. The list closed in December 2009, after it ballooned to include more than 128,000 families seeking help.
Now, that waiting list has dropped to 3,700 households, prompting NYCHA to reopen it.
Vouchers help more than five million people nationwide, but in no place is the program as expansive — and perhaps as needed — as in New York City. Here, nearly a quarter of a million lower-income New Yorkers rent apartments on the private market using vouchers. Under the program, people spend at most 30 percent of their income on rent while the rest is paid for by the government.
The vouchers can be a lifeline for lower-income families, but it has become harder to find apartments where they can be used.
In 2018, more than 70 percent of families with children were able to find an apartment to rent with their voucher within a year, according to an analysis by the New York University Furman Center. In 2022, that number had dropped to 58 percent.
That reflects both the extreme housing shortage and a continued reluctance on the part of landlords to rent to people with vouchers, according to the Furman Center analysis. A city survey showed that the rental vacancy rate was 1.4 percent in 2023, the lowest in more than 50 years. The rate was even lower for cheaper apartments.
“Just finding housing in New York, even when you have this assistance, is difficult,” said Matthew Murphy, executive director of the Furman Center. “On top of that, we know that voucher holders face discrimination.”
The reopening of the waiting list provides yet another window into New York City’s challenges with affordability.
The city also issues its own vouchers through a different program known as CityFHEPS. But both programs work similarly.
There are limits on the types of apartments vouchers can help cover. For example, the rent, in general, has to be at most around $3,000 for a two-bedroom apartment for a family of four. The figure can be adjusted higher in some neighborhoods, but sometimes there are few apartments of the right size and price point available.
The Furman Center analysis found that in 2022, it took households with children more than 160 days to find an apartment that would take their voucher.
“I had to treat it as a full-time job,” said Daniris Espinal, 38, who lives with two daughters.
Ms. Espinal advocates for survivors of domestic violence with the New Destiny Project, a housing nonprofit. She received a voucher and began searching for an apartment in 2021 after getting out of an abusive relationship, she said. It took her nearly two years to find a place, a three-bedroom apartment in Harlem that rents for $2,700. She said some landlords would dodge her requests when they found out she was trying to use a voucher.
“When you go through something so traumatic, like being in an abusive cycle and getting out of that, I think it’s important for everyone to have their space,” she said. “This is what having this voucher has given me, a sense of peace at this point.”
Jay Martin, the executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord group, said it was great that the waiting list was reopening.
“The caveat is we need housing,” he said. “What we keep seeing in the market right now is vouchers are working, but they’re crashing against a highly constrained housing market.”
He said he did not think discrimination against voucher holders was systemic. Rather, he said the application and payment process was cumbersome and not easy to use.
NYCHA has a finite number of vouchers. People on the waiting list can get vouchers when people who already have them become ineligible, by getting a higher-paying job, for instance.
Applications to join the list will be open until June 9. NYCHA officials said they would not be surprised if they get more than 500,000 applications. From the pool of applicants, they hope to pick 200,000 eligible households to add to the waiting list.
Then, in August, they will start giving out vouchers at a rate of about 1,000 households a month.
