Mayor Adams suspends NYC rental voucher restriction, teeing up potential veto of Council bills

Mayor Adams suspended a decades-old rule Friday that requires low-income New Yorkers to stay in homeless shelters for at least three months before they can apply for rental vouchers that are supposed to help make it easier for them to find permanent housing.

The suspension — enacted via an executive order — comes after the City Council passed a package of legislation last month that includes a bill that would scrap the same so-called 90-day rule. However, the Council package also contains a set of bills that expands eligibility for the vouchers, including a measure that’d make a written rent demand from a landlord grounds for applying for one — proposals Adams has vehemently opposed due to concerns about the costs they could come with.

In a press conference at City Hall on Friday morning, Adams did not immediately explain why he’s opting for the executive order route instead of signing the Council’s bills. He touted the order as a red tape-slashing measure that will “help both families and single adults.”

“Removing this rule will help even more people move into permanent housing as quickly as possible,” he said.

The Council bills will automatically lapse into law on June 25 unless he vetoes them. Adams did not immediately say at Friday’s press conference what he plans to do with the Council bills, but sources briefed on the matter say he’s likely to veto.

Adams used his veto pen once before at the beginning of his term in January 2022, when he blocked a Council bill related to penalties for violating zoning regulations in SoHo. That veto — the first issued by a mayor in nearly a decade at that point — was not controversial, though, as many Council members agreed with Adams that the bill was half-baked.

A veto of the CityFHEPS reform bills, on the other hand, sets the mayor on the warpath with Council Democrats.

Dems in the chamber have together with scores of advocates urged the mayor since he took office to use his authority to scrap the 90-day rule, arguing it needlessly keeps homeless New Yorkers in shelters instead of putting them on a faster path to permanent housing.

As first reported by the Daily News, Council members grew impatient early last month with waiting on the mayor to act on his own. As a result, the Council instead opted to pass legislation on May 25 to do away with the rule — and appended the eligibility expansion measures disliked by the mayor to the package as well.

Notably, the package passed the Council with support from 41 of the chamber’s Democrats — well over the 34-member threshold needed to override a veto.

Asked before last month’s vote if her members were ready to override a potential mayoral veto of the CityFHEPS package, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) told reporters, “We’ll cross that bridge if and when we get there.”

Manhattan and Bronx Councilwoman Diana Ayala, a Democrat who’s formerly homeless and co-wrote the core bill of the CityFHEPS package, has been more confident than the speaker on the override issue, declaring in recent weeks that it will happen should the mayor veto.

Ayala has also harshly pushed back on an argument from the mayor’s team that the CityFHEPS package could result in New Yorkers who don’t necessarily need vouchers stopping paying rent so that they could become eligible.

“It boils down to poverty-shaming,” Ayala said last month. “In order to qualify for a CityFHEPS voucher, you need to be in poverty. Who in their right mind would want to live that way if they have another option? Ask yourself that. I grew up in poverty; I understand it, many of us have, but you shouldn’t have to have lived in poverty to have a heart.”

This story will be updated