{"id":110997,"date":"2026-01-24T13:24:52","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T13:24:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/110997\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T13:24:52","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T13:24:52","slug":"congress-defies-trump-by-boosting-money-for-housing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/110997\/","title":{"rendered":"Congress Defies Trump By Boosting Money for Housing"},"content":{"rendered":"

When President Donald Trump made his budget proposal last May, disaster loomed<\/a> for housing in New York. He wanted to combine housing vouchers, public housing aid and assistance to the elderly and disabled into a single grant for each state \u2014 and sharply cut the $13 billion New York State receives for those programs.<\/p>\n

Trump also proposed placing a two-year limit on rental vouchers \u2014 used by an estimated 123,000 households in the city \u2014 for \u201cable-bodied recipients.\u201d In New York, the average length of time a household uses a voucher is 15 years. NYCHA residents have an average tenure of more than 25 years.<\/p>\n

But in a repeat of what happened in the first Trump term, Congress has refused to go along. A bill passed by the House Thursday and expected to receive Senate approval next week actually increases funds for the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development by $7.3 billion to $77.3 billion and doesn\u2019t include any new restrictions on vouchers.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that the Congress added money to the HUD budget is a complete turnaround from what we expected last year,\u201d said Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy nonprofit, which lobbied aggressively against the Trump proposals. \u201cMayor Zohran Mamdani\u2019s laser focus on affordability has woken up electeds on both sides of the aisle to what is important to voters.\u201d<\/p>\n

The only bad news for New York tenants in the HUD bill is a modest reduction in money for public housing. Operating aid is being reduced by $477 million nationwide, to $5.24 billion, and capital funds by $210 million to $3.2 billion. NYCHA was unable to say how those reductions might affect its finances.<\/p>\n

While it is unlikely that Trump would veto the spending bill, the administration has previously tried to withhold money appropriated by Congress, though many of those actions have been blocked in the courts.<\/p>\n

The bill increased money for Section 8 tenant assistance by $2.4 billion to $38.4 billion and the money for voucher renewals by $2.8 billion to $34.9 billion, which the New York Housing Conference believes will be sufficient to fund existing vouchers in the state. Project-based rental assistance \u2014 which funds rental help within an entire building that is subsidized, rather than through individual vouchers to tenants \u2014 rose by $1.25 billion to $18.1 billion.<\/p>\n

The bill also includes modest increases in housing help for the elderly and people with disabilities and AIDS. Funding for Community Development Block Grants, used to fund many positions in city government and help with financing new affordable housing, is flat.<\/p>\n

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