Affordable Housing in NYC Sees Rising Evictions as Rents and Arrears Outpace Aid

New data reveal that even those living in New York City’s “affordable” housing are being priced out, auguring deeper trouble for the city’s approach to housing insecurity.

On a raw morning in Brooklyn, a line of weary tenants snakes outside the city’s housing court—a familiar tableau, but one whose scale is quietly shifting. In 2024, landlords of so-called “affordable” housing accounted for more than one-third of New York City’s 120,000 eviction cases, according to a new analysis by the New York Housing Conference (NYHC). The report’s most salient finding: even in apartments officially deemed affordable, growing ranks of low-income tenants can no longer make the rent.

The numbers are sobering. In subsidized units—those set aside for low- and middle-income New Yorkers—owners filed over 43,000 eviction lawsuits last year, most for nonpayment of rent. These units cap tenant rent at 30% of income, counterbalanced for landlords by tax breaks or low-interest public loans. In theory, such programs offer ballast against gentrification and market forces; in practice, the pandemic’s aftermath and sticky inflation have left even subsidized tenants struggling to keep pace.

Landlords, facing narrower margins, are using the legal system as a lever. Some file early, not always to remove tenants but to urge repayment, nudge the city towards covering arrears, or—less charitably—clear the path for new, solvent renters. Almost all 2024 filings in these buildings cited back rent. This surge highlights a brewing contradiction: affordable housing is insufficiently affordable.

For the city, the implications are as plain as they are dire. Developers structure loans on the premise that 95% of tenants will pay reliably. Collection rates, however, have dipped to 90% on average and are below 80% in about one in ten subsidized buildings. Should this trend bode, not only will at-risk families face eviction, but landlords may default, undermining the delicate financial scaffolding upon which public-private affordable housing rests.

City and state response has been tepid. Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration, wary of ballooning costs, has declined to expand CityFHEPS—the city’s primary rental aid programme—beyond its $1 billion budget, even with over 60,000 households already supported. Albany, too, provided only a paltry $50 million in 2025 to launch a new Housing Access Voucher Programme, far less than advocates reckon truly necessary.

The NYHC, led by Rachel Fee, now proposes a more surgical solution: a diversion court, a hybrid of legal and administrative intervention, designed to expedite emergency rental aid and stave off eviction cascades. The ask is pointedly modest amid state budget sprawl—just $17 million. The hope: unstick the bureaucratic arteries clogging the flow of assistance, secure payment plans, and keep both tenants and landlords afloat. Legislators’ enthusiasm so far has been muted.

Trouble in the safety net

There are, of course, second-order effects. Eviction, as generations of social research attest, rarely leads to improved outcomes. Displaced families burden city shelters, strain schools, and fuel cycles of instability. The paradox is that the very public investments meant to protect the city’s most precarious residents now risk fuelling displacement of another sort—neglect-driven departures superseding those caused by rapacious landlords.

Investors and developers, meanwhile, will take note. If rising rates of nonpayment are not offset by more sustenance from government, the attractiveness of building subsidized units—never exactly a bonanza—may wane. Looser rent collection reverberates through housing finance markets, complicating future development deals and, ultimately, shrinking the pipeline of new affordable stock.

Compared to other American cities, New York’s predicament is both familiar and unique. Philadelphia and Los Angeles, too, find sites of affordable housing caught in a bind between static subsidies and swelling tenant needs. Yet Gotham is emblematic: its subsidized housing stock is among the nation’s largest, and its dependence on a fragile mix of federal, state, and local funds runs deeper than most. If the city cannot keep such housing solvent—and tenanted—the national model for public-private rental assistance itself may seem less sturdy.

Interventions elsewhere offer both hope and caution. In Massachusetts, sustained state investment in emergency rental support during and after the pandemic helped staunch eviction surges—at considerable cost. Meanwhile, in London, the search for ever more baroque housing benefits has yet to reverse increases in hardship. Internationally, rental aid tends to be either generous and administratively tangled, or efficient and puny.

Where does this leave New York? Its leaders have shown scant eagerness to spend more. Short-term infusions of aid may inoculate some tenants from displacement, but the more intractable question is whether wages, subsidies, and costs can be recalibrated so that “affordable” housing does not become a contradiction in terms. Voters may tire of the false promise that supply alone will cure the city’s housing malaise.

We are, as ever, sceptically optimistic. Even modest reforms—like the targeted diversion courts now proposed—could buy breathing room for tenants and for policy. Sacrificing affordable housing would doom New York to an even costlier set of problems, not least fiscal strain from mass homelessness. No city can truly afford to let its safety net fray so badly that it breeds crisis in the very system intended to serve as antidote.

That New York is now struggling to preserve affordability in its affordable housing sector should sound alarms well beyond the five boroughs. The city’s woes may portend turbulence for similar housing strategies nationwide. Prudent, nimble fixes will not resolve structural imbalances, but they are surely cheaper—and less cruel—than the alternatives. The cost of doing nothing, as always in New York, will be paid in the coin of disruption and displacement. ■