When President Donald Trump made his budget proposal last May, disaster loomed 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 — and sharply cut the $13 billion New York State receives for those programs.
Trump also proposed placing a two-year limit on rental vouchers — used by an estimated 123,000 households in the city — for “able-bodied recipients.” 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.
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’t include any new restrictions on vouchers.
“The fact that the Congress added money to the HUD budget is a complete turnaround from what we expected last year,” said Rachel Fee, executive director of the New York Housing Conference, an affordable housing advocacy nonprofit, which lobbied aggressively against the Trump proposals. “Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s laser focus on affordability has woken up electeds on both sides of the aisle to what is important to voters.”
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.
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.
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 — which funds rental help within an entire building that is subsidized, rather than through individual vouchers to tenants — rose by $1.25 billion to $18.1 billion.
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.
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