Helen Strom of Safety Net Project testifies on rent reasonableness and pre-application delays

Hi, good afternoon.

My name is Helen Strom, and I'm testifying from Safety Net Project at the Urban Justice Center.

I also support the work of the Safety Net Activists, where our members who have direct experience with homelessness are organizing to get everyone housing in New York City and in the state.

So on the bills today, I just want to say I think

We appreciate the efforts to make improvements to city FEPS.

They're definitely sorely needed.

We also have seen significant slowdowns in people's packets with rent reasonableness.

People whose packets are sold for two, three months and they cannot get them moving because of these rent checks.

We are glad that the city has changed policy on that.

I'll just note the policy changes for rent stabilized apartments and so still yet to be seen whether for people who are trying to get approved for city FEPS with market rate apartments if they are still going to also see delays with the new rent reasonableness policies

because it has also been a delay for market rate apartments as well.

Intro 100, we're very happy to see a push to speed up application processing times.

I think one thing we'd like to discuss with the council is there are so many parts of the process that happen before the application is submitted, right?

Before you submit an application, you need to do the pre-clearance, you need to do rent reasonableness, you need to do inspections.

All of those things happen before an application.

can even be submitted for city FEPS.

So we believe the whole process should be taking 15 days.

Like there's months and months and months that are happening of work after someone finds an apartment.

Like from when you find an apartment to when you're approved, like we want it to get to where that is 15 days.

Like right now people are waiting two or three months before they can even submit an application.

So, and at one point the agency, a year or two ago, was saying that they were going to review and turn around packets in 48 hours.

Like from when they, so I think our goal would be something that like really captures the whole process because there's so much waiting before you're even allowed to submit your application packet.

And then on intro 100, just.

Wanting to make sure that we're thinking about all the people who have vouchers who never find or have not found an apartment.

And how is that getting factored into the average?

Because the average number of days, that's for people who actually find an apartment.

But we know that there's thousands and thousands of people with shopping letters sitting in shelters who have not found one.

So making sure we're capturing that too in this data and also capturing why.

As well.

Thank you.