Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Tuesday appealed a court ruling that requires the city to expand the hugely popular — but massively expensive — city-funded housing voucher program called CityFHEPS.
As a mayoral candidate, Mamdani had promised to implement the expanded voucher program in line with laws the City Council passed in 2023 to make more New Yorkers eligible for the program.
His predecessor, Mayor Eric Adams, did not implement those laws, prompting the Legal Aid Society to sue in state court, with the City Council joining that suit. The Adams administration triumphed, but an appellate court later reversed the decision.
Contending with a multi-billion-dollar city budget gap, Mayor Mamdani said in February that his administration would negotiate a settlement in the case with housing advocates and the City Council. It was a departure from his campaign promise of a full expansion, but settlement talks between the parties were ongoing.
Now, the mayor is asking the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, to overturn the appellate court ruling, arguing that the City Council is not authorized to expand the program.
Joe Calvello, a spokesperson for Mamdani, stressed in a statement Tuesday evening that the administration is still committed to reaching a settlement and delivering a “rental assistance progam that is sustainable for the long term.”
“This is not the end of negotiations,” he said. “As the budget process advances, we will continue working toward a resolution while advancing a comprehensive, whole-of-government response to the city’s housing and homelessness crisis..”
Housing advocates criticized Mamdani for moving to appeal the court decision.
Christine Quinn, president of Win, a shelter and supportive housing provider, said in a statement, “The city’s failure to settle its challenge to codified CityFHEPS expansions is nothing short of a betrayal.”
Redmond Haskins, a spokesperson for Legal Aid, said in a statement that the city’s reasoning in its appeal was “unsound,” and that it was “regrettable that the Mamdani Administration has chosen to continue this litigation rather than focus on ensuring that vulnerable New Yorkers can access the housing support they urgently need.”
He added: “While we are disappointed that the Administration filed its appeal, we remain committed to securing an outcome that best serves New Yorkers experiencing or on the brink of homelessness and who deserve the means to stay safely in their homes or secure long-term, affordable housing.”
About 68,000 households rely on CityFHEPS vouchers, which allow renters to pay about a third of their income toward rent. While the program helps people in shelters move into permanent housing and stay housed, its cost has swelled magnificently — from about $26 million in 2019 to almost $1.8 billion in 2025.
The laws that the mayor is now arguing the City Council didn’t have the authority to pass expanded eligibility for vouchers, allowing the required income level to rise and making people facing eviction eligible, too.
If implemented, the expansion could add another 47,000 households to the program, according to a 2024 estimate by the Independent Budget Office, bringing the yearly cost of the program to over $4 billion by 2030.
Some of that spending could be offset. A recent report from WIN projected that the expanded program would save about $635 million on shelter costs over five years.
In a statement, Council Speaker Julie Menin said the Council disagreed with the mayor’s appeal.
“We have repeatedly urged them to drop this endless litigation, which only serves to delay an agreement,” she said. “From the beginning, we have asked for a settlement that protects vulnerable New Yorkers and ensures the financial stability of this program.”
‘He Promised This Thing’
In an interview earlier this month, Councilmember Pierina Sanchez, chair of the Council’s housing committee, said it made sense to implement the voucher program as lawmakers intended it.
“We have so many families that go through the whole rigmarole of an eviction just to end up in shelter to wait, wait, wait, and end up in an apartment that is more expensive than the one that they were evicted from,” Sanchez said.
Juan Figueroa, a tenant in Tremont in The Bronx, is one of those people facing eviction — and he would likely be eligible for a CityFHEPS voucher under the expanded program. He moved into an apartment with his mother and sister in 2017, but both women have since passed away.
Figueroa, 57, said he can’t work due to physical and mental health issues, so he’s not sure how he could cover the more than $33,000 of rental arrears owed.
“I’m by myself. I lost my whole family. I need help, this is real, this is reality,” he said. “If I get thrown out what’s gonna happen to me? I go back to the street?”
He expressed frustration with the mayor, too. “He promised this thing,” Figueroa said. “The thing people need most help with is paying rent.”
Former Councilmember Diana Ayala, who chaired the Council’s General Welfare Committee when it passed the voucher expansion laws, said in an interview earlier this month that she empathized with the competing interests.
“There’s no easy resolution. We have to be fiscally responsible while also acknowledging that we have a housing crisis that requires some sort of subsidized option,” Ayala said. “Increasing the availability of the voucher to folks that are already housed is even more important because the vacancy rates are just so low that it makes sense to keep people housed.”
City officials and housing advocates at a recent Council budget hearing both acknowledged the growth of the voucher program is linked to how successful it’s been at moving people out of shelters.
“If we hadn’t had CityFHEPS, then we would have far more than 100,000 people in shelters at this moment,” said Alison Wilkey, director of government affairs for Coalition for the Homeless. “The city is left with a moral choice here of, do we invest in CityFHEPS to house people and make sure that our people, our residents have a home? Or do we leave people in homelessness?”
But the city must contend with the limits of its budget and the program’s swelling costs. The program is budgeted to cost $1.78 billion in the current fiscal year that runs through June, with $1.1 billion already spent through January, according to the city’s Department of Social Services (DSS).
Even if the 2023 laws aren’t implemented, the program’s cost is expected to grow to over $3 billion by 2030.
“With increasing [numbers of] people entering the program and very few exits, it continues to grow,” said DSS Commissioner Erin Dalton.
The cost of a shelter bed for a single adult is $4,600 per month, compared to the standard monthly voucher payment of $2,646 for a studio, according to DSS, though it’s hard to compare the costs over the long term since people tend to stay in shelters for a shorter time period than in housing.
Comptroller Mark Levine, speaking at an event for affordable housing providers in early March, called CityFHEPS a “live-saving program” even as he warned there would be “tough conversations” about its future.
“This program is now growing by 4% a month, doubling every year and a half. It’s gonna hit $3 billion,” Levine said. “Put this in context, that is more than the entire operating budget of HPD [the Department of Housing Preservation and Development]. It is more than the entire capital spend on building new affordable housing in the City of New York and the expansion that’s tied up in court would probably double the pace of growth.”
Ana Champeny, vice president at the Citizens Budget Commission, argued at the Council hearing that the pace of growth of CityFHEPS vouchers — even without the Council’s 2023 expansion — is unsustainable. She pointed out that even as there’s been an increase in households using vouchers, the shelter population has not fallen.
“The city cannot voucher its way out of the homelessness crisis,” Champeny said.
