More than 5,200 households across New York City are at risk of displacement once a federal rental assistance program ends without any new funding.
New data released by the Legal Aid Society on Thursday showed the distribution of households across the city receiving rental assistance through the pandemic-era Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) Program, which helped low-income New Yorkers stay in their homes through vouchers issued by New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and Housing Preservation and Development (HPD).
Originally intended to last until 2030, the Trump administration announced in 2025 that the Biden-era EHV initiative would expire at the end of this year.
Judith Goldiner, attorney-in-Charge of the Civil Law Reform Unit at The Legal Aid Society, said that lawmakers must act fast to protect vulnerable families before the program’s funding expires at the end of 2026.
“The expiration of Emergency Housing Vouchers threatens to pull the rug out from under 5,218 NYCHA households who secured stable housing through this lifesaving program,” Goldiner said in a statement.
She pushed for state lawmakers to include $250 million in the state budget to expand a state-funded pilot program, the Housing Access Voucher Program (HAVP), to prevent thousands of New Yorkers from losing their rental assistance.
NYCHA said that it had intended to move EHV recipients to Section 8 vouchers but later announced that it would not be able to fund the transition. NYCHA asked tenants receiving the vouchers to fill out a public housing application online if they wanted alternative housing voucher options.
Without permanent funding, households across the city, especially in the Bronx, central Brooklyn, eastern Queens, and the north shore of Staten Island, are at risk of extreme rent burden and possibly eviction. The Bronx alone accounted for nearly half of all the EHV issued in the city.
The funding cliff approaches alongside a greater housing and financial crisis in the city, with alarmingly low vacancy rates, a multi-billion dollar budgetary shortfall and court challenges to a 2023 expansion of another beloved housing voucher program—City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS).
With both the city and state budgets stalled, vulnerable New Yorkers still have no concrete answers about plans to fund rental assistance programs.
