Expanding Access to Affordable Housing: VOA-GNY Testimony on NYC’s Block by block Housing Plan
September 9, 2026—VOA-GNY respectfully submitted the following testimony at the NYC Council Committee on Housing and Buildings Oversight Hearing:
Introduction and Thanks
My name is Eric Lee, Director of Public Policy for Volunteers of America – Greater New York (VOA-GNY), one of the largest housing and homeless services providers in NYC. I would like to thank Chair Sanchez and Members of the Council for the opportunity to testify today.
About Us
VOA-GNY is an anti-poverty organization that aims to end homelessness in Greater New York through housing, health and wealth building services. We are one of the region’s largest human service providers, impacting more than 12,000 adults and children annually through 70+ programs in New York City, Northern New Jersey, and Westchester. We are an active nonprofit developer of supportive and affordable housing. VOA-GNY has a robust portfolio of permanent supportive housing, affordable and senior housing properties totaling over 2,100 beds—with over 2,700 more homes actively in the pipeline, the vast majority of which will be for low or extremely low-income individuals and families.
Thank you, Chair Sanchez and Members of the Housing and Buildings Committee, for holding today’s oversight hearing on the Mayor’s Block by Block Housing Plan. We greatly appreciate this Committee’s leadership and focus on protecting and creating more affordable housing. The Council and Administration must use every tool in the City’s belt to address housing instability and unaffordability: timely development and preservation strategies, streamlined processes for people to access housing, and rental assistance vouchers to pay their rent. VOA-GNY appreciates Mayor Mamdani’s commitment to expanding housing access to low-income New Yorkers. VOA-GNY participated in the Mayor’s SPEED Taskforce which generated several helpful recommendations to streamline development and access to affordable housing.
We look forward to continued partnership with the administration as they move forward with implementation of those recommendations to shorten development and predevelopment stages and approval processes for affordable housing.
VOA-GNY is supportive of several other key recommendations from the Mayor’s Block by
Block Housing plan:
Expansion of VOA-GNY’s Street to Home Program:
We would like to thank Council Member Nurse and the City Council and Administration for your support of VOA-GNY’s Street to Home program, which offers unsheltered individuals a lease for permanent supportive housing, often within the first two weeks of meeting them. Thanks to your leadership and support, the program has expanded to include 150 units. The Street to Home model relies on an “acceptance interview” concept. Presumptively eligible applicants are shown an available unit and if they decide they want it, it’s theirs. The lessons we have learned from this successful program should be applied to other types of supportive housing. Placing the choice in the applicants’ hands has led to faster leasing and decreased vacancies.
Creation of the MATCH (Making Accelerated Transitions to Coordinated Housing) Program:
VOA-GNY supports making the MATCH program a permanent option. This program will empower homeless service providers to work directly with landlords and marketing agents to match people in shelter to homeless set-aside affordable housing units. Providers are best suited to understanding who can best utilize this precious limited resource, and by enabling providers, the City can minimize bureaucracy which slows down access to permanent housing for people experiencing homelessness and reduce time affordable housing units sit vacant. VOA-GNY stands ready to help match people residing within our 20 shelters more quickly to permanent housing.
Comprehensive Improvements of Shelter Conditions
We are heartened by the Administration’s focus on improving shelter conditions. We recently released VOA-GNY’s Shelter Conditions Report- Restoring Dignity, which takes a frank look at the City’s shelter system, which suffered decades of disinvestment, and offers actionable recommendations to rebuild and reenvision shelters to be more compassionate spaces for people experiencing homelessness. We appreciate the Administration’s openness to work with VOA-GNY to address the improvements needed for our facilities, and we hope our report can serve as a blueprint to improve the quality of shelter citywide.
HPD Recommendations to Maximize Impact:
In addition to the housing plan’s creative ways to shorten approval timelines and coordinate overlapping agencies and public approvals, additional investments in staffing will be crucial to achieving this administration’s goal of building 200,000 new units of affordable housing. HPD staff are doing herculean work to keep the City’s affordable housing pipeline flowing, but we sometimes find ourselves in a crowded queue which creates stressors for both HPD and our teams to get projects through the pipeline. Additional HPD legal, project management, environmental review and other staff capacity can hasten paperwork for the financing process so that affordable housing developers can begin the construction phase sooner.
Thank you, Speaker Menin and Chair Sanchez, for your stalwart leadership expanding access to rental assistance to more New Yorkers. HPD should move with urgency to also expand headcount to administer the new City Housing Assistance Program (CityHAP) which the entire Council valiantly persevered to create. As the $175 million for CityHAP in the FY27 budget does not automatically rollover to next year, HPD must act with all due haste to build out infrastructure with sufficient hands to quickly process applications and administer vouchers starting in January.
We urge the City to utilize a similar approach as was done with Emergency Housing Vouchers to fully utilize every available voucher. By directing city agencies to start compiling lists now of people in their care who would likely qualify, HPD can frontload the application queue. Given the 5-month application window to get every voucher out the door before funding expires, HPD cannot afford to wait for applications to trickle in come January.
Additional CityHAP Recommendations:
We are hopeful that HPD will adopt the same mindset when drafting CityHAP rules as it did when helping pen the Block by Block plan, creating streamlined solutions to maximize efficiency. Channeling that same mindset, VOA-GNY suggests the following recommendations:
- Align CityHAP application and inspection timelines with CityFHEPS and any locally
required benchmarks for CityFHEPS: By establishing uniformity in processing timelines, the City can ensure transparent standards to move people into housing. - HPD should not do rent reasonableness tests for CityHAP. Rent comparisons are not an exact science, as units vary in large and small ways within a community. Our programs report slowdowns in HRA processed rental assistance packages due to the implementation of rent reasonableness in April, and HPD has fewer staff to process rental assistance vouchers.
- HCR legal regulated rent verifications should be moved to post lease signing to avoid further delaying the application process. Switching verifications to post lease signing and working with tenants to pursue treble damages could further the Mayor’s efforts to hold bad landlords accountable while maintaining streamlined processes for accessing permanent housing.
Supported Introductions:
Int. 905-2026 (Nurse) Community Opportunity to Purchase Act (COPA): Thank you, Council Member Nurse, for your steadfast dedication to expanding non-profit affordable housing development. Non-profits are the best stewards of public resources, and COPA will spur more responsible stewardship of distressed properties and non-profit affordable housing development citywide. VOA-GNY is one of the City’s largest nonprofit developers, with 2,700 units currently in our pipeline. Through COPA, the City can reduce speculative real estate influence and displacement of predominantly low-income communities of color while enabling non-profit developers like VOA-GNY to create even more affordable
housing for low and extremely low-income households to remain within their community.
T2026-1780 (Banks): Thank you, Council Member Banks, for your leadership to make the HPD building registration process less onerous. Our staff report seeing rental assistance packets from shelter stalled because landlords of small buildings are not currently registered and unaware of the requirement, resulting in a month-long delay just to register the building. Creating an electronic registration option can help to make the registration process less burdensome for landlords to reduce this bottleneck. Additionally, we recommend HPD provide additional public awareness and outreach efforts to landlords to understand the annual registration requirement.
In Conclusion:
Thank you, Chair Sanchez and the Housing and Buildings Committee, for your continued leadership to expand and preserve affordable housing and pathways for New Yorkers to maintain their housing in their communities. Volunteers of America- Greater New York looks forward to continued partnership with the Council and Administration to help grow and preserve affordability for all New Yorkers. Thank you for the opportunity to testify today.
Testimony respectfully submitted by Eric Lee. For any additional information, please contact
me at [email protected].