NYC Council set to pass housing voucher bills Mayor Adams opposes

The City Council is set to pass a package of bills this week that would make it easier for low-income New Yorkers to get rent subsidy vouchers — even though Mayor Adams has publicly opposed the measures and privately urged Council members to also oppose them, say city government sources.

The Council’s plan to forge ahead with the legislation in the face of Adams’ opposition sets the stage for a rare mayoral veto.

Long sought by housing advocates, the legislation at hand would abolish a rule that requires people to stay in homeless shelters for 90 days before they can apply for CityFHEPS vouchers, which subsidize large chunks of rents for low-income earners.

It would also expand eligibility for vouchers by allowing those who have received written rent demands from their landlords to apply for them, taking the shelter stay mandate out of the picture entirely.

The bills are co-sponsored by a majority of the Council, all but ensuring their passage. As first reported by the Daily News earlier this month, the full Council is expected to vote on the bills Thursday after the chamber’s General Welfare Committee passes them Wednesday afternoon.

But the mayor came out against the bills Tuesday, with his spokesman, Fabien Levy, saying in a statement that they would add billions of dollars in cost to the city and cause a voucher application backlog because of the expanded eligibility thresholds.

“These bills will not only cost New York City an estimated $17 billion over the next five years — adding billions onto the backs of New York taxpayers — but will force the creation of a waiting list for vouchers, eliminating the prioritization of New Yorkers experiencing homelessness for housing subsidies,” Levy said.

Levy did not provide a breakdown for how Adams’ administration calculated the expected cost. Supporters of the bills say they would save the city money because the per-day cost of housing someone in a shelter is higher than the per-day cost of a CityFHEPS voucher.

In a last-minute effort to sway Council sentiment, Adams and senior officials of his team, including chief adviser Ingrid Lewis-Martin, started putting out calls Sunday to Democratic Council members urging them to not back the CityFHEPS bills, three city government sources familiar with the matter told The News.

Among the members who got calls from Adams’ advisers were Manhattan Councilman Shaun Abreu, Brooklyn Councilwoman Mercedes Narcisse, Manhattan Councilwoman Julie Menin and Manhattan Councilwoman Diana Ayala, the sources confirmed.

Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, who chairs the Council’s powerful Finance Committee, received a call directly from the mayor about the matter, according to the sources.

Brannan, a co-sponsor of the voucher bills, confirmed Adams called him Tuesday, but said CityFHEPS was not the only issue they discussed.

“The mayor and I speak all the time, especially during budget season,” he said, referencing ongoing talks ahead of the July 1 city budget deadline.

It’s unclear if Adams is willing to use his veto power should the bills pass this week. Levy did not respond to a request for comment on the matter.

Adams has only used his veto power once — shortly after taking office in January 2022, when he blocked a bill that would’ve increased certain zoning regulations penalties.

That marked the first time in more than eight years that a New York City mayor issued a veto, and the action did not raise controversy because key members of the Council, including Speaker Adrienne Adams, had raised concern about aspects of it that they said needed to be revisited.

The CityFHEPS bills, by contrast, have earned widespread support in the Council.

Ayala, who chairs the General Welfare Committee and authored the bill that’d get ride of the 90-day rule, said she believes the Council can even override a veto should Adams issue it.

“I think we’d have enough votes,” Ayala said. A veto override requires two-thirds of the Council’s 51 members.

The brewing fight over the voucher bills comes on the heels of lawyers for Adams taking the extraordinary step Tuesday night of asking a state Supreme Court judge to give his administration permission to suspend the city’s long-standing right-to-shelter mandate due to the spiraling migrant crisis.

With more than 40,000 asylum seekers housed in shelters and hundreds more arriving every day, Adams’ lawyers wrote in a court motion that the city has no more room and that it is thereby incumbent on a judge to amend the right-to-shelter ordinance in such a way that it could be disregarded when the city “lacks the resources and capacity to establish and maintain sufficient shelter sites.”

Established by a 1981 consent decree, right-to-shelter requires the city to provide shelter and certain basic amenities to anyone who needs it. The consent decree is widely viewed as the foundation of the city’s modern shelter system, and Adams’ court request caused a wave of backlash from homeless advocates and Democratic politicians.

In a statement, Ayala and Speaker Adams said they found it perturbing that Adams’ proposed right-to-shelter suspension came right after his opposition to the voucher bills was announced. Ayala and Speaker Adams argued the voucher plan would help the city free up shelter space for migrants and rein in migrant crisis-related spending.

“It’s beyond disturbing that so much effort is being spent on rolling back protections for all New Yorkers, instead of implementing immediate and long-term solutions that can help us avoid and move out of shelters,” they said in the statement.

“The Council’s CityFHEPS housing voucher reforms would relieve pressure on the shelter system by supporting the transition of New Yorkers left in the system for far too long, while reducing the exorbitant spending on emergency shelters.”

With Michael Gartland