NYC Council overrides Mayor Adams’ veto of rental assistance bills in major rebuke

Mayor Adams suffered a stinging political setback Thursday as the City Council overrode his veto of a package of bills aimed at vastly expanding a rental assistance program for low-income New Yorkers.

The override action — which marks the first time the Council has quashed a mayoral veto in a decade — enacts the package despite Adams’ opposition, effective in 180 days.

“New Yorkers need us to do this, and our city needs us to do this,” Council Speaker Adrienne Adams (D-Queens) said in a press conference before the override vote, adding that she has found the mayor’s opposition to the rental aid reforms “disconcerting” and based on “incorrect” information.

After the override passed, homeless advocates gathered in the Council chamber erupted in cheers. “The fact that we have to override a veto is incomprehensible to me,” the speaker said before casting her vote.

The fraught situation — which comes against the backdrop of the mayor’s increasingly hostile working relationship with Council Democrats — revolves around the CityFHEPS program, which provides some low-income New Yorkers vouchers that heavily subsidize their rent on open market apartments.

The Council’s package is designed to make it easier to receive the city-funded vouchers via a range of reforms.

The core reform is a bill abolishing the so-called “90-day rule,” a relic of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s administration requiring people to stay in homeless shelters for at least three months before being able to apply for a voucher. By doing away with that rule, eligible New Yorkers would be able to apply for vouchers as soon as they enter the shelter system.

In addition to rolling back the 90-day restriction, the Council bills would make anyone “at risk of eviction,” including someone who receives a rent demand from a landlord, eligible for vouchers as long as they are low-income earners — taking out the shelter stay requirement entirely. To further expand eligibility, the package proposes increasing the household income cutoff from 200% of the federal poverty level to 50% of area median income.

In vetoing the package last month, Mayor Adams argued the city would not be able to bear the additional $17 billion in cost that his team projects the reforms would create over the next five years. He also said an existing voucher application backlog at the city’s short-staffed Human Resources Administration would be exacerbated by the reforms, threatening to leave New Yorkers in need of the subsidies on even longer wait lists.

On Thursday, 42 of the Council’s Democrats voted for enacting the bills despite Adams’ veto — well over the 34-member threshold required to sustain an override. The chamber’s six Republicans and two conservative Democrats, Queens’ Robert Holden and Brooklyn’s Kalman Yeger, voted no.

Beyond cost and application processing concerns, the mayor has argued the Council lacks legal authority to enact the reforms — and in a statement after the override vote, he hinted that his administration may bring the matter to court.

“We are reviewing our options and next steps,” the mayor said.

Since taking office in January 2022, Mayor Adams has faced calls from homeless advocates and Council Democrats to eliminate the 90-day rule via executive action.

However, as first reported by the Daily News, Council Democrats grew impatient with waiting on the mayor to take action this spring and opted to advance legislation to lift the rule on their own instead.

Only after the Council passed its package of bills in May did the mayor issue an emergency action temporarily suspending the 90-day rule. In doing so, the mayor said he has always supported lifting the 90-day rule and that it’s the remaining components of the Council’s package that he’s concerned about due to projected costs.

The Council passed the bills in May with support from 41 of the chamber’s Democrats. The 42nd Democrat to add his voice to the override vote was Queens Councilman Francisco Moya, who was absent from the May vote.

Council Dems say the mayor’s cost projection for the CityFHEPS package is exaggerated, touting an estimate from the Community Service Society showing that the expense clocks in at $3 billion over the next five years.

Council leaders have also argued the wider impacts of the reforms could produce budget savings.

They say that’s because expanding CityFHEPS would decrease the need for stays in shelters, in which the per-person, per-night cost to the city is more expensive than the equivalent expense for vouchers. Creating more shelter space is especially critical at the moment, Council leaders say, given the city’s scramble to find housing for the tens of thousands of mostly Latin American migrants who have arrived since last spring.

Amid soaring rents, a lack of affordable housing and an uptick in eviction filings in the city in the past year, Council Democrats have also contended that the CityFHEPS reforms are critical tools for helping New Yorkers stay in their homes.

Before Thursday’s vote, Manhattan and Bronx Councilwoman Diana Ayala, a Democrat who used to be homeless and authored the main bill of the Council’s package, said the reforms are “long-term” solutions “to help New Yorkers exit and avoid homelessness.”

“To say the least,” she said, “the mayor’s veto is shortsighted.”

Queens Councilwoman Tiffany Caban, a democratic socialist who penned another bill in the package, took it a step further, calling the mayor’s fiscal concerns “outright lies.”

“Then again, I will say that the mayor’s veto comes as no surprise given his disastrous approach to housing,” said Caban, noting that his appointees recently approved rent hikes on the city’s stabilized apartments.

The mayor is not alone in raising concern about the costs that come with the CityFHEPS reforms, though.

The fiscally hawkish Citizens Budget Commission released a fact-sheet ahead of Thursday’s vote arguing the costs that come with the reforms could worsen the city’s ballooning deficit.

“In the face of a reported budget gap of $5 billion in fiscal year 2025, when these bills would go into full effect, such spending is unaffordable,” the fact-sheet said. “The City Council has not said how it would fund the expansion — what other services they would cut or what revenue they would raise.”

The last time the Council overrode a veto was in 2013, when the chamber undid then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s effort to block a police reform bill.

The Thursday override comes amid increasingly frayed relations between the mayor and the Council.

During this spring’s budget negotiations, Speaker Adams accused the mayor of seeking agency spending cuts that would “cause a lot of harm to New Yorkers in need.” After agreeing to a spending plan that didn’t reverse all cuts pushed by the mayor, the speaker stood next to him in the City Hall Rotunda last month and accused his team of employing a “counterproductive budgeting approach.”

On Thursday, she said she hopes the Council and the mayor can have a productive working relationship going forward.

“We will need to do far more to address the housing crisis,” she told reporters. “My hope is that after today we can put aside our differences with the administration.”