Amendments to CityFHEPS Program – 90-Day Stay

Online comments: 6

• MonaRichards

  I’ve had cityfheps and I haven’t been homeless since glory be to God one thing I will say the people like myself that is really in need please help them to keep this roof over there head it is so hard because brokers and landlord takes alot of advantage towards people like us I’ve been through that to speak so I’m very careful my God has been with me through this process of keeping this roof over myself and my two children head for a few years as a domestic violence survivor coming from the shelter But God keep our roof and I’m so greatly blessed 🥲!!

  Comment added April 21, 2025 7:10pm

• Denise Worthy

  I must say that the rules have changed since this voucher (FEPS) was first produced over 20yrs ago. It has caused so many hiccups and problems that landlords don’t want to rent or accept it.
  A change is needed with the process of shelter stay from 90days to 0days or maybe even a 30day period only if your family is in the shelter.
  Working all Able Bodied Working Individuals should have a job and work at least 10hrs a week to be able to support themselves and families. It’s not fair to those who aren’t in the shelter who are seeking a voucher and work to get snubbed by landlords because they have a portion of rent and a shelter client has a 0 portion of rent to pay.
  This is 2 of the main reason the shelters are over crowded and why landlords are refusing to help renters.

  Comment added August 18, 2025 11:34am

• Anonymous

  A gap exists where landlords of residential private properties who provide rentals are exempt from the same laws as landlords who opt-in to city related programs and city properties. All renters must be protected by the same protections as those in city properties and those private properties where landlord/owners opt-in. That is, any owner/landlord wishing to finance their property by renting ought to be required to follow the same rules that will provide EQUAL protections for renters. This should help to protect renters and their families from predatory, irresponsible and unfair landlords, AirBnB landlords, SRO landlords, and STO (Short Term Occupancy) landlords as well as those who discriminate for any reason, who withhold leases, demand cash payment, and refuse to acknowledge that they have collected rent from tenants and who attempt illegal evictions by cutting off heat, hotwater and electricity.

  Comment added February 18, 2026 4:45pm

• John Sahagun

  I Am Living in a very abusive household and get kicked out mostly every other night. I don’t know what to do… I stay at 2 shelters and it was one of the resort experiences ever. They told my belongings and it was unable to sleep. I just need a place to stay just enough to save some income from work and get my own place. Getting s voucher would help me out tremendously and i would no longer have to stay in this violent household.

  Comment added April 13, 2026 3:09pm

• Dr. Thandeka Mazibuko

  PUBLIC COMMENT
  Proposed and adopted amendments to the CityFHEPS rules, Chapter 10 of Title 68 of the Rules of the City of New York
  Submitted by Dr. Thandeka Mazibuko, South African oncologist, founder of End Forced Marriage Inc., New York, New York
  Comment period closing October 13, 2026

  I write as a survivor of domestic violence and of forced marriage, as a physician, and as a New York City resident who has lived the CityFHEPS system from inside it. I ask the Human Resources Administration to read this comment as a report of abuse of survivors, because that is what it is.

  First, on the removal of the 90 day length of stay requirement, I support it, and I ask that it stand permanently in the rule and not as a temporary measure. A person fleeing violence cannot count days in a shelter bed while a person hunting her counts her movements. Every day of forced waiting is a day of exposure.

  Second, on work requirements, I oppose the new requirement that single adults work 10 hours per week to qualify, and I oppose work hours being used at any point to refuse a survivor. A woman on the run cannot produce payslips for an abuser’s city. She cannot keep a fixed schedule that her abuser can learn. The City Council voted in 2023 to remove work requirements from this program because they are barriers dressed as conditions. A rule that reinstates them will deny housing to the very people the program exists to protect, including people with disabilities, people in medical treatment, and people whose work is informal, interrupted, or unsafe to document.

  Third, on the requirement that a household must not have lived in the home it is moving into at any point in the prior year, I ask HRA to write a protection for survivors into this clause. In my own case, my apartment at 332 West 49th Street, Apartment 2RE, was given to another tenant while I was still living in it. I state this plainly so the record holds it: a survivor can lose her home on paper while she is still inside it, through the acts of a landlord and the failures of the organisations meant to serve her, and a prior year clause applied without exception then bars her from the only home she has.

  Fourth, and most important, the doors into CityFHEPS still run through shelter, through the street, or through an eviction court case. A survivor who is in hiding in the community, who cannot enter a shelter safely and who has no eviction proceeding because her landlord simply took her apartment, has no door at all. That is how a person on the run gets no housing support. I ask HRA to open a community door for survivors certified through the Family Justice Centers and through domestic violence providers, with a written decision in every case and a real right to appeal a denial.

  Fifth, on addresses, I ask HRA to protect a survivor’s address as a matter of rule. I have a place to stay, and for my safety I cannot give the address of where I stay. I survived, and I still go to work for survivors of gender based violence. A system that requires a survivor to write down where she sleeps, in order to receive housing help, hands her abuser a map. HRA must accept a safe mailing address, must flag a survivor’s case confidential as the law allows, and must never let an address requirement become the reason a survivor is refused.

  Sixth, a provider’s word must never be allowed to close what HRA holds open. My provider has told me my case is closed. My case is open with HRA. I live with serious injuries to my back and my hips and a fractured knee, and still I am denied service. A woman carrying these injuries cannot meet a work hours test designed for the able bodied, and the rule itself recognises disability exemptions for a reason. When the provider says closed and the agency says open, the applicant is crushed between them, and only a written decision in her hand can protect her.

  My own record shows why written decisions matter. On January 9, 2024, a CityFHEPS voucher was issued in my case in the amount of 2,696 dollars per month, at a time when my earnings stood at zero. In September 2026 my provider, S:US, confirmed through Ms. Diaz that I qualify for the shopping letter, and the letter never came. I was spoken to about a salary cap as if it were a law of 2026. The rule itself sets an income standard, total gross income not above 200 percent of the federal poverty level, and no applicant should be denied by a cap that is quoted to her in a corridor and never written down. I name the parties to my own case for this record: 332 West 49 LLC, S:US, and Anthony Home.

  I ask HRA to adopt the removal of the 90 day rule permanently, to strike the work requirement for single adults, to protect survivors in the prior year clause, to open a community door for survivors outside shelter, and to require a written, appealable decision in every CityFHEPS denial.

  Dr. Thandeka Mazibuko
  [email protected]

  Comment attachment
  Letter-to-SUS-One-Comprehensive-Package-DRAFT-2.pdf

  Comment added October 13, 2026 10:08am

• Siphumelele Mashiyane

  PUBLIC COMMENT
  Amendments to the CityFHEPS rules, Chapter 10 of Title 68 of the Rules of the City of New York
  Submitted by Siphumelele R. S. Mashiyane, New York, New York
  Comment period closing October 13, 2026

  I am a South African immigrant. I have a full application for asylum pending in the United States. I live with a disability, anterior pituitary hypoplasia, a condition I have carried since childhood, and with a mental health condition. I write because I was denied housing, and because these rules, as written, will deny people like me again.

  When I was in the community I needed housing support and I did not receive it. I did not stand in any door this program opens. I was not in a shelter bed counting days. I was a disabled man with an asylum application pending, trying to work and trying to live, and the system had no category for me.

  I ask the Human Resources Administration to look at the work requirement in these amendments. A new requirement that single adults work 10 hours per week will be used against people whose bodies and minds do not keep an employer’s hours. My condition requires medication, monitoring, and an annual scan of my brain. I am even denied MRI scan . I have given back to the community helping men with mental health learn chess as part of mental health driven communucation. There are days my disability decides what I can do. A rule that makes housing depend on hours worked makes housing depend on health, and the sickest person is refused first.

  I ask HRA to open the program to people in the community whose asylum applications are pending, and to people with disabilities and mental health conditions who are not in shelter and not in an eviction case, before we become emergencies. Housing is treatment. A man with a home can keep his medication, keep his appointments, and keep his court dates. A man without one is carried from crisis to crisis at the city’s expense and his own.

  I am asking to be counted as a person in your rules. Denied housing, denied HRA support once is enough.

  Siphumelele R. S. Mashiyane

  Comment added October 13, 2026 10:13am