The Moyas were in the crowd at the Borough of Manhattan Community College last Monday, where the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) handed out more than 200 Section 8 housing vouchers. The voucher program allows eligible tenants to pay 30 percent of their income for rent, while the federal government pays the remainder. But NYCHA closed its Section 8 waiting list in Dec. 1994 because of a drop in federal funding (with exceptions for emergency cases) – and only reopened it again this February when nearly $100 million was restored. Officials announced that an additional 22,000 new vouchers would be made available.
The halls and classrooms at BMCC thrummed with excitement last week as NYCHA handed out vouchers and some who had waited for more than a decade finally received what could be a ticket to a better life. But anxiety was palpable too – as the 180-day clock started ticking for voucher holders to find a new place live or to get current landlords to accept their vouchers.
That’s because while residents rush to be accepted in the program – NYCHA received 231,078 applications between February and May – landlords may not be as eager. According to NYCHA, more than 29,000 private landlords participate in the program, a number they say represents a steady increase. But some housing advocates contend that there are fewer units actually available to Section 8 tenants, and that areas of the city where landlords once relied on voucher holders to fill their apartments are increasingly filled with people willing to pay more.
Landlords "can and will hold out for a non-Section 8 tenant," said Jonathan Rosen, a spokesperson for affordable housing group ACORN. “The boundaries of gentrification are going well beyond what anyone would have imagined in New York City.”
Even as the scarcity of affordable housing might make Section 8 vouchers more precious, the state of the market also makes it harder to use them, advocates say. Section 8 apartments have to be affordable in accordance with what the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) determines is fair-market rent. NYCHA spokesman Howard Marder said that means most of the qualifying apartments are rent-stabilized. But according to Rosen, there is a “crisis of affordable housing supply that New York hasn’t seen since World War II,” and the number of units renting for under $1,000 fell by more than 150,000 between 2002 and 2005, making eligible apartments hard to come by.
Adding to that challenge is that New York City has no laws barring "source of income" discrimination. Unlike Buffalo and Nassau County here in New York, and other places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C. and the states of New Jersey, Massachusetts and Connecticut, which protect Section 8 as a legal source of income, landlords here often openly express their bias in rejecting Section 8 tenants. The top responses to a basic search on craigslist with the keyword “Section 8,” for example, yield posts telling voucher holders they need not apply. While the New York Court of Appeals ruled last month that landlords must accept vouchers from Section 8 tenants in stabilized apartments when renewing their leases, many voucher holders applying do not enjoy such protections.
