SHOUT Statement on the 2024 Local Law 3 Report
“City agency states that rampant discrimination, ableism, and “non-acceptance” is the system running “just as it was intended.”
SHOUT demands real change.
HRA’s third annual Local Law 3 Report reveals what supportive housing applicants have long known: that the supportive housing application process in New York City is designed to evaluate the subjective “deservingness” or disposability of our city’s most vulnerable disabled individuals and families.
Less than 25% of people eligible for supportive housing were placed in housing this past year (FY24), and only 40% of eligible tenants received an interview. Of these, nearly one thousand homeless or at-risk New Yorkers were rejected from supportive housing based on hyper-subjective assessments, many for reasons that were openly discriminatory and unlawful under federal anti-discrimination and fair housing laws.
Thousands of people apply, and most do not access the housing they seek. For those lucky individuals and families who get an interview referral from DSS or OMH’s contracted referral organization CUCS, there is no guarantee they will receive anything resembling a fair shot at accessing supportive housing.
The report documents multiple discriminatory denials that violate the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As a DSS official stated in the public presentation of Local Law 3 data last week, DSS does not see itself as the “arbiter” of violations of the ADA. The system “is running just as it was intended.”
What does that mean? It means disabled people rejected from housing because they are deaf, or use a wheelchair, or because of the gender ratio at a given building, or because they have difficulty obtaining documents, or because they “lack insight into their mental illness,” or because they need an undefined “higher level of care.” That high-stakes determination is made by the arbitrary snapshot assessments of “providers,” typically by non-clinical staff who almost universally have no serious oversight.
In an insulting twist, those same staff members persistently override the assessments and determinations of DSS’s own highly-trained clinical social workers, who are charged with making determinations for eligibility in the first place. In other words, DSS policy is to allow provider-landlord staff to have more say over access to housing for disabled people than DSS’s own clinical staff.
Meanwhile, non-profits take contracts promising to provide support and house “the most vulnerable,” but, after the signatures dry, go on to declare that they are actually unable to fulfill those commitments. Agreements to help tenants access and maintain benefits, to connect tenants to mental health treatment they actually find helpful, to provide assistance with basic money management and so on are not carried through. There are no consequences when that happens, and providers are well aware that neither the City or State are likely to step in.
There is no legal oversight of this system - there is no appeal option for rejected applicants, most of whom will never know why they were rejected, and there is no reasonable accommodation process even for applicants who are denied for blatantly discriminatory reasons. This system setup to “house the most vulnerable” is also set up to deny them the basic rights that form the cornerstones of ensuring fair access to housing.
This is a process designed for the benefit of the same wealthy non-profit executive class who make their careers building corporate asset portfolios through fancy new buildings that they – shamelessly – name after the “pathbreaking” CEO’s of their organizations, while simultaneously fighting unionization of their staff and paying caseworkers crumbs, and persistently shifting blame to disabled applicants and tenants for every problem that riddles the supportive housing industry.
When applicants are denied housing, they find themselves sent off to the four-winds, targeted by cops, sanitation workers, and municipal outreach teams for sweeps (often run by the same organizations that develop and operate the supportive housing they could never access). They will cycle through shelters or hospitals or jails, the historic institutions social welfare systems have made for people who are relegated to the absolute margins, or worse.
Perhaps this sounds dramatic. But imagine yourself as one of the thousands of people who never get a fair shot when you are already struggling to the point of just eking by on the streets or in a crowded shelter. Imagine hearing then that the system that lacks any serious checks and balances is running “just as it was intended.”
Deep reform is urgent:
There must be a clear reasonable accommodation process, including a right to notice of the basis for rejection. There must always be an opportunity to appeal a denial;
There must be legal oversight of all parties involved in the referral process.
This isn’t just good, fair, housing policy–it is the city making an effort to avoid a very real risk of litigation on behalf of thousands of people unlawfully kept homeless, due solely to its failure to clean up its act for 3 years running.
If DSS is unwilling to right this ship voluntarily, SHOUT is calling on local legislators, attorneys, and grassroots advocates to take the steps necessary to compel the agency and its nonprofit partners to follow and enforce the law.
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