CBS New York Investigates: Housing voucher discrimination in New York City

NEW YORK -- "No Section 8 allowed." It's a claim that's illegal for local landlords to make, but it's still rampant across the city.

And now, a CBS New York investigation has found the City of New York scaled back one of its main tools to prevent this type of housing discrimination by nearly 90% over the last few years.

Investigative reporter Tim McNicholas asked the city what it is doing to prevent this from happening.

"No vouchers are accepted!" for a certain two-bedroom apartment in Jamaica, Queens.

"NO Section 8" at a one-bedroom in Astoria, or a four-bedroom in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx.

Those are just a few of more than a dozen Craigslist postings the CBS New York investigative team found over the past few weeks, all from landlords or brokers in New York and New Jersey openly and illegally stating they won't accept housing vouchers.

Lorraine Hernandez has been searching for affordable housing for a year now and she recently got a message from a landlord, saying "Vouchers are not acceptable."

"Reading this message, even though he said just a sentence, wrecked my whole hopes," Hernandez said.

CBS New York wanted to know if real estate agent will even break the law face-to-face. So, we responded to a post and set up a tour of a Crown Heights building with someone who said they worked with Lockbox Realty.

"Would they accept someone on vouchers?" McNicholas asked.

"Vouchers are a tricky subject for landlords," the agent said. "What my broker said is not right now, unfortunately. But maybe in the future other landlords might be open to it."

Lockbox Realty later told CBS New York the Craigslist post "was not authorized" and "goes against company policy."

The kind of undercover viewing CBS New York set up has been used by fair housing organizations for decades. It's called a "voucher discrimination test."

Our investigative team dug into records and found the number of voucher discrimination tests completed by the city's Human Rights Commission has steadily dropped over the past few years -- from 245 in the 2019 fiscal year, to 136 a year later, and then only 31 in fiscal year 2023, which ended June 30.

"Why is that?" McNicholas asked.

"I know during the pandemic it went down a bit because we didn't have in-person testing. We were not sending our testers out in person, and we were doing only telephone testing and online testing, but that number will go up quite significantly this year," said Sapna Raj, deputy commissioner of the Commission on Human Rights.

Earlier this year, Mayor Eric Adams announced a four-year, $3 million plan to ramp up voucher discrimination testing. The mayor's office said the newly-announced citywide budget cuts won't affect that program.

But CBS New York has learned, last month, the city eliminated three vacant jobs in the Human Rights Commission, rather than filling them.

And fair housing organizations told CBS New York the current staffing levels already create challenges in an affordable housing crisis.

"A lot of people in the voucher-holding community are dissuaded from filing a lawsuit because they know it's going to take me months to find somebody to talk to," said Ashley Eberhart, co-founder of Unlock NYC.

The nonprofit mapped out all the voucher discrimination complaints it has received over the last six years. It found in more than half of the complaints, the landlord or broker simply stopped responding when vouchers came up.

"We're also seeing in Chicago, in New York, elsewhere, the emergence of chatbot technologies, AI, impacting the way that people are filtered out of admissions criteria, even before they're able to talk to a person," Eberhart said.

Hernandez recently reached out to Unlock NYC and now the nonprofit has helped her finally find a home that will accept vouchers.

"I am moving in there in two to three weeks," she said.

But she knows there are countless other New Yorkers, like her, vexed by voucher discrimination.

CBS New York also reached out to the owner of the building we toured in Brooklyn and we have not heard back.

And if you have a story that needs investigating, email the team at cbs2investigates@paramount.com or give them a call at 1-929-697-2581.