Affordable Housing Evictions Climb as Rents Outpace Wages, Report Finds a $17 Million Question

With eviction filings surging even in subsidized housing, New York faces the unsettling prospect that its own affordable homes are growing out of reach for the city’s most vulnerable residents.

New York’s housing court calendars are swelling. In 2024, nearly 43,000 eviction lawsuits—over a third of the city’s total—were filed by landlords of affordable, government-subsidized homes. For a system designed as a safety net for low and middle-income New Yorkers, these figures portend a profound and troubling shift.

The New York Housing Conference, a policy group with a penchant for unvarnished data, has put a number on the problem: the city’s “affordable” housing has become increasingly unaffordable for precisely those it is meant to serve. Their recent analysis points to an alarming trend—owners of subsidized housing are now among the most prolific filers of eviction cases, mostly over nonpayment of rent.

Affordable housing in New York typically promises capped rents pegged to no more than 30% of a tenant’s income, leveraging tax breaks or soft loans for landlords. In theory, such mechanisms should shield tenants from the worst fury of the city’s property market. In practice, however, rising costs and Covid-era aftershocks have left many unable to pay. Pandemic job losses and stagnating wages have pushed thousands, even in heavily subsidized units, to the brink of dispossession.

Landlords in turn find themselves squeezed. Publicly subsidised developments often depend on 95% rent collection—a goal now proving fanciful. The New York Housing Conference cites an October 2025 report showing collection rates dropping to 90% across the sector, with one in ten buildings scraping by at below 80%. For some developers, these shortfalls threaten the very solvency of the buildings and, by extension, the sustainability of the housing stock itself.

The implications for New York are as dismal as they are predictable. City budgets, already strained, must contend with both rising shelter costs and pressure to prop up tenants at risk of eviction. Mayor Zohran Mamdani, facing a $1 billion annual bill for the CityFHEPS rental assistance programme, has signalled reluctance to expand it further—a decision that leaves thousands of precarious renters in limbo.

On the state side, lawmakers have tiptoed as well. Last year saw the birth of the Housing Access Voucher Program, a hesitant $50m initiative that barely scratches the surface of need. Meanwhile, serious proposals for new strategies—like the Housing Conference’s $17m call for diversion courts to streamline aid and keep people in their homes—have caught less momentum than their architects had hoped.

When affordability demands subsidy upon subsidy

Renters, for their part, are painfully aware that the notion of “affordability” is losing its meaning. With rents eating up 30% or more of even subsidized wages, the vaunted Housing Connect lottery feels less a prize than a holding pattern before inevitable hardship. National benchmarks mark 30% as the safe upper limit for rent burden, but in New York, stagnant wages and rising living costs render even this “cap” puny relief.

This squeeze radiates outward. Community groups warn of knock-on effects in local economies: with more income devoted to rent, spending at neighbourhood shops and businesses shrivels. Landlords desperate for payment turn to eviction lawsuits less to oust tenants than to hasten action—from renters themselves or from city agencies dispensing overdue aid. The courts, already sluggish, face mounting caseloads and legal bottlenecks.

The politics of the problem is quietly toxic. Democrats who dominate both city and state politics have long pledged to champion affordable housing, but the cost of doing so at scale grows every year. Voters—be they renters, landlords, or unhappy taxpayers—are increasingly skeptical of new funding unless programs are made plainly more efficient and less patchwork.

Nationally, New York’s predicament is anything but isolated. Cities from Los Angeles to Boston report similar trends: what passes for subsidized housing is pricing out even those for whom it is meant. The pandemic has stripped bare the assumptions built into the legal and funding bedrock of America’s housing safety nets. In some peer cities, rent ceilings and emergency programs have proved thinner shields than policy-makers had imagined—or promised.

Yet there are glimmers, if not of optimism, then at least of pragmatism. The proposal for a new diversion court—a modest $17m experiment to triage eviction cases and speed up emergency aid—does not seek to overhaul the system so much as to shore it up where it is already failing. More efficient aid could spare both vulnerable tenants and under-pressure landlords, as well as the city fisc.

Still, the lasting lesson is brutally simple: in the absence of rising incomes or a sustained drop in rents, affordability is a moving target forever receding from those who need it most. New York remains a city where public subsidies are both essential and, now, evidently insufficient. No paltry tweak, however well administered, will fix that.

In the meantime, the city quietly turns to increasingly awkward stopgaps: legal diversion, one-time payments, and a slow recognition that the well-intentioned schemes of the last generation are due for a thorough retrofit. Until then, a growing number of New Yorkers will find even the most “affordable” housing beyond reach—another strained promise in a city of big ambitions and bigger deficits. ■