NYC Council set to pass housing voucher bills opposed by Mayor Adams, prompting last-minute lobbying from his team: sources

The City Council is set to pass a legislative package 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 measure and privately urged Council members to vote against it, municipal government sources told the Daily News on Wednesday.

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

Long sought by housing advocates, the bills 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 heavily subsidize rent for low-income earners.

It would also expand eligibility by allowing those who have received written rent demands from their landlords to apply for the vouchers, 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 News earlier this month, the full Council is expected to vote on the bills Thursday.

On Wednesday afternoon, the Council’s General Welfare Committee approved the bills in a unanimous vote.

The committee’s green light came after the mayor on Tuesday came out against the bills. In a statement, Adams spokesman Fabien Levy said the mayor believes the bills would cost the city billions of dollars due to increased demand 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,” Levy said.

In a separate statement, Levy said the mayor’s team told the Council he’d support a standalone bill that’d only undo the 90-day eligibility rule for families. “But the Council rejected our proposal to help these families,” he added.

Supporters of the bills have argued 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.

Exact cost breakdowns could be murky due to a variety of factors, like household sizes and length of shelter stays. A City Council spokesman said the chamber plans to release its own fiscal impact analysis on the bills before Thursday’s vote.

Manhattan Councilwoman Diana Ayala, who chairs the General Welfare Committee, voiced confidence before her panel’s vote that the bills would produce savings. She noted that the mayor’s own “Housing Blueprint” from last year says it costs the city an average of $8,773 per month to house a family of two in a shelter for a month — compared to the $2,387 a monthly CityFHEPS voucher costs for a one-bedroom apartment.

“This is the stupidest opposition in the world,” Ayala said of the mayor. “It doesn’t make any sense because it’d save money.”

Despite that 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 said.

Brooklyn Councilman Justin Brannan, who chairs the Council’s 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 Thursday. Levy declined to say.

Adams has only used his veto power once — shortly after taking office in January 2022, when he blocked a zoning-related bill.

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 Speaker Adrienne Adams and other top members had raised concern about aspects of it they said needed to be revisited.

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

Bronx Councilwoman Pierina Sanchez, who penned the measure that’d make receiving a rent demand a CityFHEPS eligibility factor, voiced confidence the bills already have support from the two-thirds of the chamber needed to override a potential veto.

“We are going to have a veto-proof majority, we are going to make sure that this is enshrined into law and then we are going to work with the administration to get them into reality,” Sanchez said Wednesday afternoon.

The beef 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 right-to-shelter mandate.

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 the right-to-shelter ordinance should thereby be modified 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 decree is the foundation of the city’s modern shelter system, and Adams’ court request caused a wave of backlash.

Ayala and Speaker Adams said in a statement that supporting the CityFHEPS bills would make more sense for the mayor than seeking to undo right-to-shelter.

“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. “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