Lauren Price of Brooklyn Defender Services testifies on voucher discrimination and delays

Good afternoon, Council.

I'm Lauren Price.

I'm the Associate Director at Brooklyn Defender Services in our civil practice.

I won't belabor.

You saw me nodding along to everything all my colleagues said.

We agree on many of these things.

We support all of these bills, and we encourage the council to expand this oversight to the time limit process that everyone else has mentioned about rent reasonableness, about all the delays at home base.

Our clients...

Have a common and incredibly frustrating experience, even with advocacy and lawyers and advocates on their side, of signing an apartment when they're desperate to find an apartment,

going to Homebase to seek out the shopping letter and all the processes to move, and then losing that apartment because it takes so long for everything at Homebase before the packet goes to HRA.

Yes, the time constraints on the HRA packet approval is important, but I agree with what everyone else has said, that it needs to be applied to all the other parts of the preclearance, the rent reasonableness review, and everything else at home base and in the other pre-steps before the application.

One other part of this process I want to note is that CityFEP doesn't mean that you have

Having a voucher doesn't mean you have an apartment.

And despite...

I'm sorry, CityFibs doesn't...

Can you just pull the microphone a little bit closer?

Having a shopping letter doesn't mean you will get an apartment.

And part of that is because we...

We have strong source of income discrimination laws, but landlords and brokers very much know that enforcement is weak, and they're not likely to be held accountable.

Non-existent, almost, one might say.

Also non-existent.

They're absolutely unlikely to be held accountable for turning away voucher holders.

I also want to share that we've experienced a kind of insidious form of voucher discrimination where we've heard that brokers don't want to rent to voucher holders who have a portion of their own.

So they want to rent only to people whose voucher will be paid, the rent will be entirely paid by the voucher instead of people who work or have Social Security income or other income that would mandate that they have a portion to be paid.

So this discrimination and all other forms of voucher discrimination erode the program and the rights of tenants and people who would be using the vouchers.

The council should work with the commission to enforce source of income discrimination laws and make sure that home-based and shelter staff are equipped to voucher holders to address these.

And I know the city has increased funding for staff and CHR in this budget, but the level of funding is still very insufficient.

to allow discrimination to be appropriately investigated in a timely manner, because that needs to be done very quickly.

That's an immediate turnaround, otherwise the apartment will go to somebody else just because of that delay.

Finally, as everyone else has already said, for the program to run efficiently, it's essential that it moves smoothly and quickly at all of the stages.

There's delays, there's errors, there's lapses in communication.

And this is all advocates who work with tenants and voucher holders telling you this.

And we are begging the agencies that we work with to work faster.

People who don't have people on their side sending those emails and calling and following up, I don't know how they ever achieve an apartment.

So we encourage the council to make sure that the appropriate HRA offices and home-based offices are funded, staffed, and trained to meet these guidelines.

Thank you for your time.

Thank you so much.

Thank you all for your testimony.