Section 8 Housing – New York City

Posted on July 1, 2010 by townsend

• Housing aid plan set, By Brittany Hutson, July 1, 2010, Wall Street Journal: “New York and federal housing authorities have come up with a plan to allow the city to make good on its promise to provide subsidized housing to thousands of low-income New Yorkers. ‘We’ve created a plan to ensure that everybody that has a voucher today will continue to have a voucher,’ said Rafael Cestero, the city’s Housing Preservation and Development commissioner. In December, 2,500 families that had been approved to receive assistance from the city’s Housing Choice Voucher Program, also known as Section 8, were told that their vouchers wouldn’t be honored because the New York City Housing Authority exceeded its annual allotment of 99, 951 vouchers. Since then, hundreds of families that lost vouchers have been evicted or face eviction and dozens have entered city homeless shelters, according to Judith Goldiner, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which provides legal representation to Section 8 and public housing tenants…”
• Deal restores public housing subsidies, By Cara Buckley, June 30, 2010, New York Times: “A brewing housing crisis that could have resulted in thousands of struggling families losing their rental subsidies has been averted, officials said, thanks to an intricate $32 million plan devised by city and state agencies that received federal approval on Wednesday. Under the plan, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development will basically rescue the city’s public housing authority by taking responsibility for financing thousands of rental subsidy vouchers. The rental subsidies, meted out under a program called Section 8, enable recipients to put 30 percent of their income toward rent at private apartments while vouchers pay for the rest. The city’s public housing agency, the New York City Housing Authority, administers about 100,000 of the vouchers with money provided by the federal government…”