City Hall announced a new housing pilot program on Wednesday that would earmark as much as $10 million to repair dilapidated and vacant rent-stabilized homes for New Yorkers in need of housing, the latest move by the Adams administration to address the city’s housing troubles.
The “Unlocking Doors” initiative would allocate up to $25,000 each for renovations to 400 rent-stabilized apartments deemed “chronically vacant” and in need of “significant” restoration.
The goal would be to incentivize property owners, especially those with low-rent houses, to make repairs. Once units are deemed safe to occupy they would be rented to homeless New Yorkers with CityFHEPS, a rental supplement program operated by the Department of Social Services.
“In the midst of this housing crisis, we need to unlock every opportunity to create safe, quality, affordable housing,” Adolfo Carrión Jr., the Department of Housing Preservation and Development commissioner, said in a statement.
Housing has become a hot-button issue for both Adams and Gov. Hochul recently. City homelessness hit record numbers last year as housing demand outstripped supply and rents skyrocketed. The Unlocking Doors scheme is just one facet of Adams’ broader housing plan, and the 400 households it would provide represent a fraction of the estimated 16,534 homeless families in New York.
The CityFHEPS program — short for “City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement” — has itself come under fire recently amidst reports of dysfunction, inaccessibility, overwhelmed staff and other issues. Up to a third of homeless New Yorkers are eligible for the subsidies, which enabled nearly 5,000 households to move into permanent housing during a recent 12-month period.
Nonetheless, officials and housing leaders praised Unlocking Doors as a “creative” approach to the housing problem and expressed hope for the program.
“This is exactly the kind of innovative public-private partnership we…
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