NYC cracks down on supportive housing evictions—but will it work?
City officials are asking the landlords who house vulnerable New Yorkers to stop evicting them, except in the most serious circumstances.
The new guidance comes a year after our website reported that landlords who get public money to house the most vulnerable New Yorkers - including people who were recently homeless and those with mental illness and substance abuse disorder - sought eviction warrants for hundreds of people last year. The data was the first of its kind and compiled by Legal Services NYC, a nonprofit that offers free legal help to low-income New Yorkers, and shared with our website.
But tenants and their advocates point out that while it's significant the city is acknowledging there's a problem, city officials aren't saying how they will enforce the measure.
"It reads as a list of suggestions rather than as a list of requirements," said Christopher Lamb, director of litigation at Bronx Legal Services. "What's really necessary here are requirements backed up by some consequence if a provider doesn't do those things."
Being evicted can have serious consequences for vulnerable people, tenants and advocates say. They say taking supportive housing tenants to housing court for payment issues that can be resolved outside of litigation is harmful for families and costly for the city - especially amid a housing shortage and the city's push to get homeless New Yorkers off the street.
The goal of supportive housing, three city agencies wrote in new guidance issued earlier this month, is to help New Yorkers remain stably housed. The guidance goes on to instruct landlords and service providers to avoid housing court whenever possible and intervene early when residents fall behind on rent. It also requires providers to report monthly how many tenants are falling behind on payments and how many are being evicted.
"If they actually enforce it, it would make a huge difference and I think could seriously improve the situation with evictions," said Sean Murray, a member of the tenant union Supportive Housing Organized and United Tenants, or SHOUT.
Tenants in supportive housing pay 30% of their income toward rent while the city covers the rest. The housing is funded with a mix of city, state and federal dollars that also cover additional social services. The arrangements can be complicated; sometimes private landlords own the buildings, while nonprofits offer services and use city dollars to cover the rent.
The 42,000 units across the city are a critical part of the safety net that keep New Yorkers from returning to homeless shelters or ending up on the street. Still, tenants and their advocates argue that since the industry ballooned in the last decade, supportive housing providers are too often failing to provide the actual support their residents need and too quickly sending them to court over unpaid rent.
Supportive housing landlords filed 810 eviction warrants, most for overdue rent, in the last 17 months, according to Legal Services NYC. Of those, 270 tenants were evicted.
Rent is part of the deal
Pascale Leone, executive director of the Supportive Housing Network of New York, an organization representing 200 providers statewide, said housing providers are already doing much of what the city guidance requires, adding that the city also needs to streamline the way it provides emergency rental assistance to tenants when they fall behind paying rent.
"The supportive housing community remains committed to doing everything possible to help tenants remain stably housed," she said.
But Leone said many providers have been struggling financially as more tenants have accumulated owed rent since the pandemic.
"Without reliable rental income, the viability of the model itself is at risk," Leone said in a statement. "Rental income is foundational to the supportive housing model. It enables providers to deliver critical services, maintain buildings and pay staff a living wage, while also supporting tenant independence and autonomy."
The new city guidance outlines "minimum requirements" providers should offer tenants falling behind on rent. The steps include issuing written notices, providing financial literacy, helping tenants enroll in automatic payment deductions and helping tenants enroll and renew their benefits, which often help cover their portion of the rent.
A spokesperson for the city's Department of Social Services said the guidance was the first step toward stopping unnecessary evictions. Department spokesperson Neha Sharma said the city will collect more comprehensive data to better assess the scale of the problem and intervene before cases reach the point of eviction.
Sharma said the agency is also working to tighten enforcement around contracts in the coming months, and "hold providers accountable for not following the guidance."
A spokesperson for the city's Department of Health and Mental Hygiene didn't detail additional steps the agency was taking to enforce the guidelines but said the directive elaborates what's already in the contracts, and emphasizes providers take a proactive role to help tenants.
Housing with support
Lamb said he would have liked to see the guidance explicitly require landlords to include in their eviction paperwork that a tenant is in supportive housing. He said that disclosure to a judge could help a tenant secure additional help, such as Adult Protective Services or a guardian ad litem, and slow down the process.
Andrew Stern, a spokesperson for the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, said it was a top priority to minimize evictions.
"Evictions are destabilizing, traumatic and costly for tenants, owners and the city," he said in a statement. "We are committed to minimizing evictions, however enforcement here is challenging because the relevant contracts are already signed and in place, with no easy mechanism to amend them."
Stern said the city is considering sharing data with the courts that could identify supportive housing for judges.
Lamb said the city should go a step further and require supportive housing landlords to seek permission before filing an eviction, similar to the process for subsidized landlords housing tenants with HIV/AIDS - where evictions are rare.
"It's ultimately disappointing that the city has recognized this problem, knows what's necessary to avoid these evictions and hasn't taken that step," he said.
Murray, from the tenants union, said they've been issued two eviction notices, once because a prior nonprofit provider wasn't paying the landlord its portion of the rent.
They said many times tenants have a serious disability and need help managing their finances but don't find that support with their housing provider. Murray said going through eviction proceedings even if they don't end in eviction is traumatic and stressful, especially for people already experiencing mental illness.
"A huge percentage of people who are getting successfully evicted have the highest service needs, and these are people that are getting dumped back into the shelter system or dumped back under the street," Murray said.
"To me, they're probably the people who really should be in supportive housing more than anyone else."
CORRECTION: This story has been updated to correct the number of months Legal Services NYC has been tracking evictions. They have been tracking 17 months. It has also been corrected to clarify when Murray faced eviction proceedings.
