Eric Lee of Volunteers of America testifies on CityFHEPS and Homebase delays

Hi, good afternoon.

My name is Eric Lee.

I'm Director of Public Policy for Volunteers of America Greater New York.

Thank you, Chair Hudson and members of the committee for allowing me to testify today.

So while these bills aren't being heard today, I do want to flag that VOA supports Intro 232 to shorten housing history requirements for PATH family intake to one year, as well as Intro

816 to allow families to self-attest their housing history at PATH intake.

By addressing shelter eligibility, these two bills can help also address housing eligibility and streamline access to permanent housing.

Currently, our shelter staff report that applications for city fabs can take anywhere from two to four months to be approved.

They note that since the rent reasonableness test has gone into effect in April, that they've seen delays stretch out to months, and we urge HRA to reconsider the impact of this cost containment measure.

We support the goals of Intro 98 by Councilmember Brewer.

We appreciate the ability for same-day corrections of minor issues there, as well as limited focus re-inspections so that conditions don't continue to churn when they're looking at different reviews.

We did want to flag that changing the language from assessment to inspection and assessors to inspectors may necessitate additional city funding just so that shelter staff, if they're doing these.

have building code certification training.

Let's see, Intro 100, we also support this.

We have some recommendations how to further disaggregate the data by the approval process and different referral and eligibility mechanisms to more closely reflect the experience of the different types of applicants and help outline potential bottlenecks in areas for additional resources.

We have that in our written, so you can read that.

Intro 101, we also support that.

We just flagged that you may want to change the 15-day to 10-day, 10 business days for consistency's sake.

And for pre-concerted bill 1424, we support this bill.

We wanted to flag that landlords have been messaging to our staff that they are hesitant to take city FEPS because of payment delays.

One of our survivors recently left our DV shelter, got into permanent housing.

And while the three-month advance for city FEPS was paid to the landlord, the ongoing rent never was.

So now she's worried that her housing is at jeopardy, and we're trying to work with her and the landlord to try to get the issue resolved there.

And I just wanted to also flag Councilmember Banks'intro 1023 related to HPD building registrations that is creating a bottleneck because small landlords are not aware that they need to register with HPD.

Creating an electronic option can help with that bottleneck.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.