The New York City Housing Authority has mistakenly cut off federal rent subsidies for hundreds of public housing tenants at privately run buildings, triggering hundreds of eviction notices and frightening residents who insist they’ve paid their rent on time without fail.
The erroneous cutoffs occurred at multiple NYCHA developments run by private firms the housing authority relies on to manage properties under a controversial program called Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, or PACT.
The problem appears to be a paperwork screwup, with NYCHA terminating tenants’ Section 8 rent subsidies because they believed the tenants had failed to recertify their income and household makeup, as they’re required to do each year.
The number of Section 8 terminations over recertification jumped nearly 2,000% in the space of a single year, according to data from the Legal Aid Society.
But tenants say they’ve filed everything as required, and on Friday NYCHA officials admitted that a huge backlog in processing recertifications resulted in wrongful Section 8 terminations. In response, the building management companies began billing tenants for the full, unsubsidized rent.
Surge in Section 8 Terminations
“NYCHA has met with legal and advocacy groups to discuss a scanning backlog issue the Authority experienced which resulted in erroneous termination warning letters being sent to some households,” spokesman Andrew Sklar told The City Reporter. “This scanning backlog has since been resolved and we are committed to improving our systems and processes as well as our communication with residents regarding their legal obligations.”
The scope of the issue is not completely clear, but the nonprofit New York Legal Assistance Group says it has fielded hundreds of calls from tenants in PACT developments in the last several months who were hit with eviction notices related to recertification issues.
A public records request by the Legal Aid Society revealed the number of Section 8 terminations due to failure to recertify jumped from 42 in 2024 to 836 last year.
On Sunday, the housing advocacy group Metro Industrial Areas Foundation held a rally in East New York on the issue, singling out three developments there — the Linden, Boulevard and Penn-Wortman Houses — where they say hundreds of families who thought they were following the rules are now fighting to keep their apartments.
‘Crisis’ For Families
Yolanda Moore, a tenant in the Boulevard Houses and a leader of East Brooklyn Congregations/Metro IAF, said both NYCHA and the private building managers share blame for the quagmire, charging that NYCHA loses recertification paperwork while building managers “have been unable to navigate the Section 8 recertification system sufficiently.”
“We are seeing a recertification crisis in PACT,” Moore said. “We were promised PACT would make our homes stable and decent. Yet Linden, Boulevard and Penn-Wortman alone have hundreds of people in housing court for non-payment — and we know many of them paid their rent. We also know this is happening in many developments citywide.”
Housing court records show that Stanley Avenue Preservation LLC, the entity managing Penn-Wortman and Linden, has filed more than 900 eviction proceedings against tenants there since 2023, almost exclusively for non-payment. The New York Legal Assistance Group said it’s not clear how many are related to the Section 8 cutoffs but they believe it’s in the hundreds.
NYLAG associate director Anna Luft said no one — neither the housing authority nor the PACT building managers — seemed to know precisely what was causing the problem: “There’s confusion with tenants. There’s confusion with building managers in the management office. They don’t seem to ever have a clear answer on what to do and when to do it. Because the way it’s been implemented, there’s been no clear structure.”
Seeking Mamdani’s ‘Heavy Hand’
She said tenants are now looking for help from Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who has promised increased attention to NYCHA’s struggles — to create a system that actually functions.
“It will take a very heavy hand from the mayor’s office to structure this,” Luft said, “because up until now, NYCHA has not demonstrated any willingness to foster the structure for this program to run smoothly.”
Under PACT, the housing authority retains ownership of properties but turns over management to private sector firms. Tenants in PACT developers are still required to pay rent, but their share is capped at no more than 30% of their income. The rest is subsidized by Section 8 housing vouchers.
To retain this subsidy, all households must file annual paperwork re-certifying their incomes and household makeup. Tenants say they have filed the required documents — only for the housing authority to terminate their subsidies for not recertifying.
Massive Arrears
Without the Section 8 subsidy, PACT building managers then began charging their full, unsubsidized, rent amount, while tenants continued to pay at the subsidized rate, leading to massive arrears and eviction proceedings.
NYCHA claimed one tenant — who insists they filed all the required documents — owed a stunning $80,000 in back rent.
“I’m talking about people who do everything they’re supposed to do and there’s still a delay” addressing the paperwork problem, Luft said. “It could be paperwork that was lost by NYCHA or the (private sector manager) and during that time, they’re being charged unaffordable rent.”
Luft’s organization has seen this issue surface “in multiple developments across the city,” she said.
Housing authority officials said the erroneous subsidy terminations only occurred with tenants who submitted their paperwork via the mail or through walk-in centers — which, more often than not, is the favored method of seniors living in public housing.
At the Linden Houses in East New York, tenant leaders and longtime residents Stanley and Leslie Fields say they struggled for months to straighten things out after they started getting billed for market rate rent. Leslie Fields, 69, told The City Reporter that every time she filed the paperwork for recertification, she would get a message that she still needed to recertify.
“I was running back and forth, doing everything I could to comply,” she said. “At the same time it was really raising my blood pressure because I just wanted to get it done and finished.”
In one visit to NYCHA’s office to deliver her paperwork, she said the staffer couldn’t figure out how to use the on-line portal to register the information. During another visit, the NYCHA management employee said “he couldn’t understand why my rent was going up and my subsidy was going down. It was ridiculous.”
Before the matter was resolved, the Fieldses were paying a higher than normal rent. They are hoping to obtain a credit toward future payments.
A 63-year-old who lives with her son in a two bedroom apartment in the Penn-Wortman development in East New York, who spoke on the condition that she remain anonymous because she doesn’t want to alienate NYCHA, said she’s been struggling to straighten out her situation for nearly a year.
At her development’s management office, “The lady told me I had to go back to downtown NYCHA and she gave me questions to ask them about why they’re billing for market rate rent,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to pay that, because I did what I was supposed to do.”
As of last month, this resident was told she had $45,600 in alleged arrears.
Spokespersons for Boulevard Together, the management firm at the Boulevard Houses, and C+C, the manager at Penn-Wortman and Linden, declined to comment and referred questions to NYCHA.
Though multiple tenants continue to be told they are tens of thousands of dollars in arrears, housing authority spokesman Sklar said that once advocacy groups and lawyers confronted NYCHA with the problem, the recertifications were processed and the erroneous termination letters nixed.
The erroneous arrears will ultimately be erased from the records, he said.
According to the New York City Housing Authority, recertifications can be completed and submitted online through NYCHA’s Self-Service Portal (selfserve.nycha.info) — accessible via computer, smartphone, or tablet. Paper copies of the interim/annual recertification can also be requested by contacting the Customer Contact Center at 718-707-7771.
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