Mayor Zohran Mamdani is scaling back his campaign promises to support tenants and homeless New Yorkers by failing to expand the CityFHEPS program, tenant and shelter advocates said during a rally at City Hall on Tuesday.
Funding for CityFHEPS (City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement), a rental assistance program, was rolled back to $1.64 billion in the mayor’s preliminary budget last month, which advocates said is “far less” than required for expansions codified by the NYC Council in 2023.
CityFHEPS has come under fire in the past year for major cost overruns since it was first introduced in 2019 during the de Blasio Administration; a Citizens Budget Commission analysis conducted last year found that city spending on the program had grown 44 times over six years, from an initial $25 million commitment to $1.1 billion in the 2025 fiscal year.
At Tuesday’s rally, dozens of advocates expressed serious concern with the mayor’s move to reduce CityFHEPS funding in his preliminary budget, as well as his willingness to drop any legal battles against the program — despite saying otherwise on the campaign trail. The lawsuit, a years-long, back-and-forth dispute between the Mayor’s office under Eric Adams and the City Council, joined by housing advocates, has been over whether and how the program should be expanded.
“We rallied because people in our coalition feel very disappointed and frustrated at Mayor Mamdani walking back on his campaign promise on expanding CityFHEPS,” said Adolfo Abreu, housing campaigns director of VOCAL-NY. “When he was running as a candidate, he agreed to dropping the lawsuit and fully expanding CityFHEPS.”
Citing a budget crisis, the mayor said at a news conference last month that his administration is looking for ways to settle the case. amNewYork contacted the mayor’s office to see if the administration still plans to settle or move on to other ways to support the program and is awaiting a response.
Concerns are arising over Mayor Mamdani’s budget.Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
Abreu said many New Yorkers felt let down by the mayor’s recent actions.
“I think a lot of us in our communities felt betrayed by the mayor,” he said. “There are a lot of campaign promises that the mayor has walked back on. Particularly the first two campaign promises that he made that he’s betrayed homeless New Yorkers on are the expansion of CityFHEPS and reinstituting encampment sweeps.”
Other advocacy groups at Tuesday’s rally included the Coalition for the Homeless, Housing Works and WIN.
NYC can’t ‘voucher its way’ out of the homeless crisis
CityFHEPS, launched in 2018, is the largest publicly funded rental subsidy in the nation. Officials have described it as a “vital tool” to end homelessness and promote housing stability for New Yorkers. According to the city’s Department of Social Services, the program has processed 57,888 new cases, helping 123,762 individuals to secure permanent housing since its inception through March 2025.
But NYC has tripled its spending on helping the homeless, despite more New Yorkers living on the streets. The program’s expenses have increased dramatically through the COVID-19 pandemic years and beyond. Last year, its projected costs were $1.2 billion, according to a state comptroller’s report from January.
Another state report from this month shows the number of homeless people in New York increased from 3,588 in 2019 to over 4,500 last year.
Nevertheless, advocates maintain that expanding the voucher program will help alleviate the homelessness crisis — but it requires adequate funding from City Hall.
Christine Quinn, president and CEO of WIN and a former NYC City Council speaker, said Mamdani’s current commitment to CityFHEPS is not enough rental assistance during a housing and affordability crisis.
“Mayor Mamdani’s preliminary budget is clear: he intends to walk away from his promise to implement codified CityFHEPS expansions over the objections of the City Council, advocates, and countless New Yorkers,” she said. “While committing $1.64 billion for CityFHEPS is appropriate and appreciated for current levels of implementation, this figure fails to cover critical CityFHEPS expansions during the worst affordability crisis in modern history.”
Still, other New Yorkers are not as convinced that CityFHEPS needs to grow.
Despite the program adding over 40,000 vouchers in the last five years, the number of households in shelters has not fallen, representatives from the Citizens Budget Commission (CBC), a spending watchdog group, said. In fact, it is now 21.5% higher than fiscal year 2021, excluding migrants and asylum seekers, they explained.
“To cut to the chase, capping the CityFHEPS program at the current number of vouchers would save $330 million in fiscal year 2027 budget and $3.0 billion over the five-year financial plan, without taking away vouchers from current recipients,” Ana Champeny, vice president for research at the CBC, said during a NYC Council testimony on Tuesday.
She added that the costs to fund the voucher program tripled in the last three years, similar to the findings in the state comptroller’s report.
“The city cannot voucher its way out of the homelessness crisis, and it isn’t. Not only is the program fiscally unsustainable, but even as the number of city-funded vouchers has more than tripled, the number of households in shelters hasn’t shrunken—in fact, excluding migrants and asylum seekers, it has increased by 21.5%.”
In the meantime, Abreu recognized the concerns surrounding CityFHEPS and does not want the city to have to rely on rental assistance to keep New Yorkers housed. But overall, he said, the program works.
“I think there is a world in which we are able to expand,” he said. “There are people who have concerns about the costs of the program, that it’s growing and unsustainable, but the program has worked. Households in NYC have found housing and remained housed because of CityFHEPS.”