Testimony: Hearing to Examine Issues Related to Homelessness, Housing Insecurity, and Affordable Housing, and Identify Potential Legislative Remedies

Thank you for this opportunity to comment on the role of rent assistance in preventing and responding to homelessness. The Community Service Society is an independent nonprofit organization that addresses some of the most urgent problems facing low-wage workers and their communities here in New York City, including the effects of the city’s chronic housing shortage.

The shortage of affordable housing is the preeminent cause of homelessness. The private market provides far too little housing at rents that low-income New Yorkers can afford, and much of our governmental housing effort is directed at households with incomes higher than those most at risk of becoming homeless.

New York State includes 1.6 million low-income renter households with incomes less than twice the federal poverty threshold, but only 1.5 million houses or apartments with rents that a household at exactly twice the poverty line can afford. This is why 78 percent of the state’s low-income tenants pay unaffordable rents of more than 30 percent of their income, and 42 percent pay more than half their income in rent. New York City’s notoriously high rate of unaffordable rents is actually almost exactly the statewide average. Other areas, including Long Island, Rochester, and many of the state’s smaller cities, have even worse affordability problems. 

Households paying unaffordable rents have less money to spend on other necessities including food, clothing, childcare, transportation, and health care. This can cause problems that spiral out of control, placing families at risk of losing their homes.

This problem is getting steadily worse, as the state’s stock of housing affordable to low-income people fell by 10 percent from 2012 to 2017. State and local governments around New York State are using federal subsidy resources to increase the supply of affordable housing, but these efforts usually result in housing that is targeted to households well above the poverty line. The problem is that the major subsidy programs are designed to pay for the cost of constructing new housing but not to help pay for the operation of the buildings once they are built. Many New Yorkers receive incomes that are too low to enable them to pay for the operation of their apartments at an affordable rent level.

In recent years, New York City has made great strides in directing more of its new affordable housing to the families with the greatest need, but even there 80 percent of new affordable housing is targeted to families earning more than about $29,000 a year for a family of three.

If we are to respond to the homelessness crisis with housing policy, we must shift away from the main subsidy tools used to develop new affordable housing today, towards tools that work for people with lower incomes. The best tool for this purpose is a subsidy that can pay part of the cost of operating an already built apartment. This can take the form of an operating subsidy directly attached to an affordable building, or it can take the form of rent assistance such as a Section 8 voucher, which tenants can use to pay part of their rent for any apartment.

It is encouraging that five of the six top candidates in the Democratic presidential primaries have announced that they support massive expansions of Section 8, a proposition that would cost more than $5 billion a year for New York State alone. If Section 8 vouchers were made available to every income-eligible renter household, roughly three quarters of the benefit in dollar terms would flow to New York City tenants, reflecting the size of the city, the large share of city residents with low incomes, and the high cost of housing. But the social benefits would also be extremely important in other parts of the state, where rents are lower, but the incomes of low-income people are lower too. A full expansion of Section 8 would provide needed relief to well over a million families across the state, and it would also get affordable housing policy back in the business of preventing homelessness and providing housing for homeless people.

It is of course likely to take years before this new interest in housing in the national political scene results in actual legislative change. Fortunately, there are steps that the State of New York can take this year to create a more targeted and thus less expensive form of rent assistance.

Both Home Stability Support (S. 2375 Krueger/A. 1620 Hevesi) and the Housing Access Voucher Program (S. 7628 Kavanagh/A. 9657 Cymbrowitz) are proposals for rent assistance that would be directed to families who are either already homeless or facing the most immediate risk of losing their homes. They can both be seen as attempts to focus perhaps $500 million worth of rent assistance on the people with the most pressing need.

Home Stability Support is structured as a supplement to public assistance benefits and would be administered by social service agencies. The Housing Access Voucher Program is more directly modeled on the federal Section 8 program and would be administered by local public housing authorities and by the state Homes and Community Renewal agency in its capacity as a public housing authority.

One important advantage of the Housing Access Voucher Program is that it can be used to assist individuals or families who do not receive public assistance benefits, including those receiving Supplemental Security Income and those who are not eligible for any income support because of their immigration status.

The Community Service Society of New York strongly supports both these proposals.

Thank you again for the opportunity to offer our comments. For more information or if you have any questions, please contact Tom Waters, Housing Policy Analyst, at 212-614-5366 or twaters@cssny.org.

Issues Covered

Affordable Housing