How to Find Housing With a Voucher in New York City

 

A guide for homeless and low-income New Yorkers facing red tape, shady landlords and agency mismanagement in their search for a place to live.

This article originally appeared in The City.

By Rachel Kahn

NEW YORK - Housing vouchers are a central tool in the city’s efforts to solve the housing crisis. But for many New Yorkers, the problem isn’t applying for assistance, but what comes next: finding an apartment and securing the voucher.

And it’s a real uphill climb. 

According to an audit published last week by the state comptroller’s office, it took people an average of 10 months to find an apartment and secure a CityFHEPS voucher, the biggest housing voucher program in the city. That’s a long time — especially when you have to reapply every 120 days to maintain your eligibility to search for housing.

Advocates, tenants and real estate agents alike describe the process of acquiring CityFHEPS as frustrating and demoralizing.

“A lot of these clients when they first get the voucher, they are so excited,” said Phyllis Curry, a housing coordinator with the homelessness- and AIDS-prevention nonprofit Housing Works. But once the housing search begins, people with vouchers quickly encounter bureaucratic delays and hostility from landlords. “Talk to them within a month or two, that excitement is out the window.” 

Even once voucher holders find a landlord willing to rent to them, they can still face months of delays due to the complicated bureaucracy involved with actually acquiring the voucher — something that can only happen once the housing search is over. 

We won’t sugarcoat it: this process is long and challenging. But, at the end of the journey, many New Yorkers are able to find housing at a genuinely affordable price point. 

Neha Sharma, a spokesperson for the Department of Social Services, which oversees the city’s main voucher program, emphasized that a record number of households had been placed into housing using CityFHEPS in the 2024 fiscal year — over 13,000, an increase of 42% since 2023. (In that same period, however, the total homeless shelter population increased around 50%.)

Sharma said the voucher audit by the state comptroller is “rife with inaccuracies and misstatements, completely fails to acknowledge the monumental scope of the city’s efforts and fundamental challenges with the larger housing ecosystem.”

To help New Yorkers through the process, THE CITY spoke to real estate brokers, advocates and experts on income-related discrimination to figure out how New Yorkers with vouchers can find homes.

Vouchers 101: Names to Know

New Yorkers may be eligible for a variety of housing vouchers. Some operate using national funding, while others are funded by New York State or even the city itself. 

• Section 8, also known as the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV), is a federal program that pays the majority of someone’s rent. Some people receive project-based Section 8, which is only applicable to a specific building in public housing. People using Section 8 vouchers generally spend around 30% of their income on rent. This summer, the Section 8 waiting list opened up for the first time in over a decade, and 200,000 households were selected out of over 600,000 who applied. Of the households on the waitlist, the mayor’s office says they will issue 1,000 vouchers each month.

• CityFHEPS is a voucher  administered by New York City that provides rent subsidies for individuals and families with children who are facing eviction and have previously been in the shelter system, or are currently living in a homeless shelter.

• FHEPS is run by New York State, and is specifically designed for families with children who also receive cash assistance, and who have potentially been impacted by domestic violence or other safety issues.

There are other housing vouchers as well: HASA rental assistance assists New Yorkers living with HIV/AIDS who receive Cash Assistance and Special One Time Assistance (SOTA) vouchers help people leaving shelters with one year of rent.

For this guide, we’re going to focus on advice for those with CityFHEPS, which is by far the largest housing voucher program in the city. But source of income discrimination is illegal regardless of the voucher you use to pay for housing (more on this later). 

Who is eligible for a city housing voucher?

Eligibility for different vouchers varies, however, rental assistance is sometimes available to New Yorkers who are facing eviction or experiencing homelessness, and who are below a certain income level or have an open public assistance case.

If you’re facing eviction and looking for help, call or visit a Homebase office. Homebase is a network of homeless prevention nonprofit sites that offer services like eviction prevention and emergency funding. They can help you determine whether you’re eligible for a housing voucher. 

Your eligibility will be determined by your income, household size, housing status — i.e. whether you are in shelter or facing eviction — and other factors. For CityFHEPS, you must be facing eviction, have income below 200% of the federal poverty level and have lived in a homeless shelter previously.

Remember: It is illegal for a landlord to discriminate against you because you have a voucher.

A landlord can’t deny you housing (or the opportunity to view an apartment) just because you are paying with a voucher — it’s illegal. In New York, we have laws against Source of Income Discrimination. However, discrimination still affects many voucher holders in their housing search, and we’ve got more on how to spot, record and report discrimination below. 

Step 1: Determining eligibility and getting your shopping letter

If you are at risk of homelessness but not currently living in a city shelter, you can start the process of getting a housing voucher by visiting or calling a Homebase location.

If you’re currently in a shelter, you likely don’t have to do anything else in order to begin the process of getting a housing voucher: your eligibility will be automatically determined, and if you’re in a shelter, that means you’re eligible. 

If you’re found eligible, either your Homebase representative or your shelter housing specialist will give you two documents: a “shopping letter” and a “household share letter.” These really important documents demonstrate that you may be eligible for FHEPS or CityFHEPS and enable you to start the apartment searching journey. (More on them in the next section.)

Step 2: Finding an apartment 

First, it’s important to understand what’s on your shopping letter and your household share letter. Your shopping letter tells you the maximum rent price for the apartments your household will be eligible for. 

This is not the same as the amount of funding that the voucher will contribute: that number is on your household share letter. DSS guidelines emphasize that the household share letter is for your personal use only — you don’t need to tell a landlord what percentage of your rent the voucher will cover. 

Your shopping letter on the other hand will help guide your apartment search and can help your real estate agent or landlord understand the situation. It’s important to look for apartments within the bounds of your shopping letter. For example, if your letter gives you $3,777 for a three-bedroom apartment, you can’t get a two-bedroom apartment for that same amount of money — CityFHEPS will lower your funds to match the size of the new apartment. 

Even if you manage to get an apartment of the same size for a far lower price, you will still have to pay your portion of the rent — around 30% of your income — and you cannot stretch the voucher’s benefits for longer than they are allocated.

The shopping letter can also be useful to show to landlords, as it specifies any incentives that they might get from the program. For instance, with CityFHEPS, landlords receive the first four months of rent up front as soon as you move into the apartment. Brokers’ fees are also covered to some degree, though the amount which will be paid is different for CityFHEPS and FHEPS and depends on whether you’re moving from a shelter or from another apartment.

According to people who help get voucher holders into housing like Curry from Housing Works, persistence is key. “What I tell people is, you have to do your homework with housing,” Curry said. “You have to search, search, search.”

Real estate agent and housing advocate Suzanne Adler co-authored a pamphlet with the nonprofit Neighbors Together that breaks down step-by-step how to search for an apartment. To start your search, make sure you have copies of important documents on hand like your shopping letter and bank statements.These will help you move quickly when an apartment is available. “Take notes and just be organized,” Adler told THE CITY. 

There is no special website or listing publication where voucher-friendly apartment listings exist. According to Adler, looking online is by far the best way for voucher holders to find an apartment. Though Adler says that some voucher holders may be encouraged to call real estate agents by their case workers, Adler emphasized that the industry has largely moved online. 

“I don’t know about other brokers, but me, the minute I get a listing I tell everyone on the planet about it by listing it on my platforms,” Adler said. “So, in my opinion, the most efficient way to look for a rental is to reach out concerning a particular apartment and going from there.”

She recommends people look on sites like Streeteasy that make it easy to define your search by the number of bedrooms and maximum rent listed on your shopping letter — you can even write “voucher” as a keyword in the “more filters” section of your search to see apartments that say in their description that they’ll take voucher holders. 

Step 3: Reapply, as needed

After 120 days, or around 4 months, your CityFHEPS shopping letter will expire. This just means that someone with Homebase has to reassess whether you are still eligible.

For example, if you got a new job, your income level may be too high to get CityFHEPS. Just send your most recent paystub to your Homebase case worker and they will issue you a new shopping letter as soon as they can.

Step 4: Inspection and your CityFHEPS package

 

Now that you’ve found an apartment, the next step is putting together a package for CityFHEPS to be approved by the city Human Resources Administration. First, someone from the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) will do an inspection of the unit. Then, you work with your shelter case manager or your Homebase representative, your future landlord and a broker (if you used one) in order to submit a package of documents. 

This process can be lengthy, and can have some bureaucratic twists and turns. For example, according to Curry, if you don’t submit the package by the 10th of the month then you have to submit another lease, which delays the process further. Apartment inspections are another common source of delays.

“Sometimes the inspection will fail because there's a screw missing on a window, something super arbitrary,” said Manon Vergerio, head of data and advocacy at Unlock NYC, a nonprofit organization that helps renters document and report source of income discrimination. “And then it takes five months to move in.”

Vergerio emphasized that these delays make things worse for everyone involved. “The person is stuck in the shelter, and the landlord is getting a bad taste of what the voucher program is like,” she said. 

Landlords face challenges when it comes to working with the voucher programs, as well — according to the recent state comptroller audit, there were multiple instances where rent payments to landlords were delayed. 

On a recent deal that Adler did, she successfully set up a small landlord with a voucher holder. “The landlord wanted to rent to this person, was fine with the fact she had a voucher, and the tenant was thrilled,” she said. But the process of actually securing the housing voucher took two months, which stressed out the landlord who wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to pay her mortgage during that time. 

“That’s the main objection that I hear,” said Adler. “It’s not that the person necessarily has the voucher, it’s the bureaucracy of the voucher.” 

However, DSS has taken steps to try and streamline this process, the agency says. By the end of the year, DSS spokespeople say that they will have moved much of the CityFHEPS operations to a new online platform, Current, where case workers can manage the CityFHEPS applications, renewals, and payments.

At the moment, the platform is just built for internal CityFHEPS processing, but the next phase of the rollout will include an outward-facing portal where landlords can receive and track rent payments for their CityFHEPS tenants. 

Handling discrimination: How do I know if a landlord is refusing to rent to me because of my voucher?

Since she started working as a real estate agent in 2017, Adler has seen the types of discrimination faced by voucher holders shift. Today, “it’s a little more covert,” she said. 

This makes it harder for voucher holders to identify whether or not they’re being discriminated against. “They think that discrimination is only saying no vouchers, but it’s not,” said Adler. “Sometimes it’s saying nothing at all.”

According to Unlock NYC the most common type of discrimination is ghosting — when a landlord just stops responding. 

“A user or a tenant will have a conversation via text or email, but the minute that they mention that they have a voucher, they no longer get any sort of communication,” said Jessica Valencia, head of communications at Unlock NYC.

Unlock NYC was created by and for people who use housing vouchers. Their site has a wealth of resources to help renters understand what constitutes discrimination, and how to report it. Unlock NYC has a brochure on denial tactics so that you know what to be on the lookout for when searching for an apartment.

They also say that large landlords are more likely to use more covert tactics like ghosting, whereas you’re more likely to hear something explicit from smaller buildings. Unlock NYC says that this trend might be explained by the fact that larger landlords have lawyers advising them on how to avoid discrimination lawsuits, or that smaller landlords might be less aware of the law. 

“The trends have definitely gotten sophisticated over the years,” said Valencia.

Even though it’s common for landlords to ask for income and credit requirements, refusing to rent to someone who doesn’t provide these details is still a form of discrimination. Valencia sees people being asked if they have a specific credit score, or whether they make over 60 times the rent.

“It’s obviously a way to prescreen and vet the candidate, and if the person is receiving a voucher they obviously do not have the financial means to make 60 times the amount of rent at that moment,” said Valencia. “That’s why they received the voucher, because they need the financial help to get back on their feet.”

How to report discrimination 

The most important step of reporting discrimination comes before the discrimination occurs: document everything. 

Take screenshots of the listings you’re looking at online and email or text if possible with the landlord so there’s a written record of your conversations. Unlock NYC has a Rights Recorder app that voucher holders can use to both document and report discrimination.

If you’re calling over the phone, put it on speaker and have a friend record the call, or use a phone recording app. (THE CITY wrote this guide on how to legally record a conversation in New York; because New York is a one-party consent state, it’s legal to record a phone call in NYC even if the person on the other end doesn’t know you’re recording.) 

Since there are multiple reasons why a landlord might not rent to someone — the biggest, especially in this housing market, being sheer competition — if you want to prove discrimination, you’ll need to get a little creative. 

When you communicate with a landlord or broker, whether over text, email, or phone, don’t state up front that you are using a voucher. That way, if the landlord stops responding to you only after you mention your voucher, it’s easier to prove discrimination. 

You can also do what’s called a comparator test.

“Have a friend call or reach out to that same broker or landlord and pose as a cash- paying tenant,” said Valencia. If the friend is able to view the apartment, then the voucher holder can use that as evidence that the apartment wasn’t just unavailable for ordinary competition reasons, but that they were discriminated against.

Once you’ve documented your potential discrimination, you can report it in a couple of ways. Unlock NYC has an app where you can both record and report discrimination, or you could go straight to the source and report it to the New York City Human Rights Commission, the city agency that handles discrimination complaints. For people using Unlock NYC’s app, one of their organizers will reach out to anyone who submits a report and help them figure out next steps.

“Some folks may want an intervention, which means that CCHR could step in and talk on behalf of the tenant to allow them to view the apartment or rent the apartment,” said Valencia. CCHR, the Citizens Commission on Human Rights, can help tenants advocate for themselves and secure housing. “Some folks may want to pursue litigation.”

Larissa Story, the director of a Homebase run by Catholic Charities, says that it’s always good to report discrimination. Someone from CCHR will get in contact with the broker. 

“They will threaten them, and in some cases the clients are able to get the apartment,” Story said. 

And in the event that a lawsuit is successful, landlords will know to be more careful moving forward. After Parkchester Preservation Management, a big landlord in The Bronx, was sued by the city for discrimination, Story says she’s seen them fall in line. “I know who the management is, they’re very thorough with their inspections,” she said. “So there is good that comes from it, especially with those big landlords.” 

However, while it’s always good to report discrimination when you encounter it, you shouldn’t let it slow you down in your housing search. Advocates agree on the most important part of looking for an apartment: just don’t give up.

“The system eventually works, it’s just a lot to navigate,” Adler said. “It’s a marathon.”

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