Affordable Housing Evictions Climb as Rents Outpace Wages, New York Seeks Quicker Fixes

Even New York’s affordable housing is slipping beyond the reach of struggling tenants, raising questions about the efficacy and sustainability of the city’s vaunted housing safety net.

On a blustery February morning, the corridors of Bronx Housing Court buzzed with anxious tenants and weary attorneys. More than a third of the city’s 120,000 eviction lawsuits in 2024, a record tally, were aimed not at market-rate renters, but at occupants of government-subsidized homes—so-called “affordable” units designed to protect New Yorkers from exactly such hardship. That number, unearthed by the scrupulous analysts of the New York Housing Conference, amounts to over 43,000 filings in a single year.

It is an uncomfortable turn for a city that has, for decades, prided itself on cushioning its poorest residents against the full force of the private market. Rents in these affordable apartments are meant to be capped at 30% of tenant incomes, with subsidies, tax breaks, and cheap financing provided in exchange for this promise. Yet thanks to pandemic-era job losses, persistent wage stagnation, and the blunt inflationary gusts buffeting all incomes, even these attenuated rents are drifting out of reach for many.

Landlords, meanwhile, have responded as one might expect when faced with growing arrears and tighter margins. Eviction filings—especially for nonpayment of rent—have become a lever to prod tenants into paying or to spur officials to intervene with emergency funds. Although eviction filings do not always lead to actual removals, their psychological and financial toll on renters, and their deleterious knock-on effects for children and families, are plain to see.

New York’s policymakers face a dilemma with few palatable options. Rachel Fee, of the New York Housing Conference, has proposed the creation of a “diversion court”—a specialised tribunal empowered to expedite processing of one-time rental aid and broker payment plans before cases reach the hard, impersonal machinery of housing court. She estimates the required investment at a modest $17 million, a rounding error in the city’s $110 billion budget. The hope: that quicker relief will keep tenants housed, landlords solvent, and the city’s social fabric intact.

Yet even as recommendations gently pile up in Albany’s in-box, state lawmakers remain allergic to costly, open-ended assistance. The city’s primary rent aid programme, CityFHEPS, already costs more than $1 billion annually and serves upwards of 60,000 households. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, acutely aware of fiscal optics, has rebuffed calls to expand the scheme further. Meanwhile, last year’s Housing Access Voucher Program—a pilot for state-backed rental vouchers—launched with a mere $50 million, enough to fund, at best, a fraction of demonstrated need.

Behind the policy squabbles lurks a sharper economic conundrum. Developers of affordable housing, both nonprofit and for-profit, structure their financing on the premise that at least 95% of tenants will pay rent reliably. Recent data, however, suggest those assumptions are eroding: rent collection rates tumbled to 90% citywide last year, with roughly one in ten subsidised buildings reporting collections below 80%. The emerging gap bodes ill for building maintenance, reinvestment, and long-term project viability.

For tenants, the numbers mask harsh second-order effects. Households that enter affordable housing through the city’s Housing Connect lottery often earn too much to qualify for other safety-net programmes but too little to cope with rising utility, food, and transport costs. When fortunes wobble, these renters find themselves punitively squeezed—facing evictions despite, on paper, their subsidised status. Children’s schooling, neighbours’ trust, and community stability all suffer.

The legal wrangling comes as other cities grapple with similar, though often less acute, pressures. In San Francisco, rental arrears have prompted a surge in evictions among below-market renters, albeit with less coordination between city and state agencies. London, facing its own housing crunch, has funnelled more central-government cash to shore up affordable housing rents, but political will—and purse strings—may not extend indefinitely.

The limits of the current model

What, then, does New York’s predicament portend for other metropolises? For one, that widespread reliance on means-tested, project-based subsidies alone is unlikely to stanch the flow of hardship in times of mass economic distress. It also exposes the vulnerabilities of a system in which the label “affordable housing” has become a fixture in political speech but a moving target for those who need it most.

It would be tempting to chalk up the present woes to a transitory shock, soon to be papered over as the post-pandemic economy rights itself. We reckon that underinvestment, both in income supports for tenants and liquidity cushions for landlords, has left subsidised housing surprisingly brittle. Short-term fixes such as a diversion court could help, but risk entrenching a piecemeal, reactive culture in place of a more systemic approach.

Experience elsewhere suggests a measure of guarded optimism. Jurisdictions that have expanded, rather than retrenched, rental assistance—Scandinavia, for instance—tend to weather such storms with less disruption and misery. But New York’s special blend of local autonomy, legalism, and budgetary constraint militate against seamless imitation.

Still, it would be churlish to ignore incremental progress. The willingness of civic organisations to chronicle and publicise unflattering numbers signals a mature debate. Likewise, the modest but steady experimentation with legal diversion and targeted payments bodes better than unthinking austerity. What remains, for policymakers, is to face uncomfortable arithmetic: “affordable” must mean affordable in practice, not merely in codebook.

The promise of security through affordable housing was never meant to be absolute. It requires continuous, sometimes painful adjustment as circumstances shift and markets convulse. For now, New York faces hard choices between short-term aid and longer-term reform—a reckoning as bracing as the city’s February gusts. ■