Maritza Rico
Manager of Policy & Advocacy
June 10, 2026

Thank you, Finance Committee Chair Lee, Council Members, and Council Central Staff, for the opportunity to submit written testimony on the executive budget for Fiscal Year 2027.

 

ABOUT NEW DESTINY

Founded in 1994, New Destiny’s mission is to end the cycle of domestic violence and homelessness for low-income families and individuals by developing and connecting them to safe, permanent, affordable housing and services.

New Destiny is the only organization in New York City dedicated exclusively to permanent housing solutions for survivors of domestic violence. We are the largest provider of supportive housing for survivors in New York, and we operate the first and biggest federally funded rapid rehousing program for those impacted by domestic violence in our city.

We are a co-convener of the Family Homelessness Coalition (FHC), a collective of formerly homeless parents and organizations committed to tackling housing insecurity among families in our city. New Destiny is a member of the Mayor’s Office to End Domestic and Gender-Based Violence (ENDGBV) Advisory Council and the Supportive Housing Network of New York.

 

Domestic Violence & Homelessness

Domestic violence and homelessness are fundamentally connected. As New Destiny documented in its report, A Crisis Compounded: The Dual Crises of Domestic Violence and Homelessness, domestic violence is the leading cause of family homelessness in New York City, pushing more families into shelter than evictions.

Due to the lack of permanent housing options, compounded by the devastating, long-lasting effects of abuse, survivors may linger in shelter for years. In 2025, only 9% of survivors moved from a Human Resources Administration (HRA) domestic violence emergency shelter to a permanent home, while more than half left for another shelter upon reaching the State- mandated limit of 180 days.

One in 4 survivors and their children had to move to the massive Department of Homeless Services (DHS) shelter system. For survivors, entering the DHS system means losing the anonymity and the supportive services of the HRA domestic violence shelters. This not only represents a safety risk for them and their children, but it also may mean an even longer shelter stay for survivors and increased costs for the city. On average, families with children stay in DHS shelter for over a year, according to the Fiscal Year 2025 Mayor’s Management Report.

With no certainty of when they might be able to find a safe home, survivors are forced to make the impossible choice between homelessness or remaining in abusive situations, putting their lives at risk. In 2023, 1 in 6 homicides were domestic violence homicides in New York City, in which the victim was either an intimate partner or a family member.

 

Recommendations

We thank the Speaker and City Council for their support of survivors of domestic violence in achieving safety through stable housing. Your advocacy on the CityFHEPS expansion, EHV transition, and increased funding for supportive housing has made a direct impact on survivors all over the city. This budget cycle we are focusing on the following priorities to keep advancing more equitable and inclusive systems for survivors in our city.

 

Plan for contingencies for federal funding cuts

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) announced funding cuts of at least $1.23 billion and significant policy shifts in its Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) for the Fiscal Year 2026 Continuum of Care (CoC) Program Competition. The CoC Program is the largest federal source of resources to address homelessness. Across New York State, nearly 9,000 people who rely on CoC programs may lose their housing, including people with disabilities, seniors, and domestic violence survivors.

Since 2019, New Destiny has received HUD funding through the New York City CoC to operate the first and largest rapid rehousing program for domestic violence survivors in the five boroughs. This program provides housing navigation help, temporary rental assistance, and supportive services to promote long-term housing stability. In 2022, New Destiny added a second rapid rehousing program dedicated to survivors with housing vouchers, such as CityFHEPS, FHEPS, and Section 8. At any given time, we are supporting more than 300 domestic violence households across these two contracts, which together represent a third of New Destiny’s budget.

Like the other 165 CoC programs in New York City, New Destiny’s rapid-rehousing programs are a lifeline for New Yorkers, including thousands of survivors. While we are working with broader coalitions to urge Congress to protect the CoC, DSS must plan for contingencies to ensure these New Yorkers remain stably housed.

 

Create a CityFHEPS lifeline for NYCHA Emergency Housing Voucher households

The Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) program is a federal rental subsidy created in 2021 as a 10-year initiative in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic to house 70,000 households nationwide, focusing on those in the most dire need, like people living on the streets and survivors trying to flee an abusive relationship. Though originally funded through 2030, the Trump administration announced in 2025 that the program had run out of funding early — putting the 50,000 households who rely on the voucher at risk of losing their homes.

New Destiny was among the nonprofits selected by the city to provide voluntary housing navigation to EHV recipients. In less than two years, we helped house over 700 domestic violence survivors with EHVs. New Destiny went a step further and secured private funding to make aftercare available to the survivors we placed. We know firsthand how vulnerable many would be to returning to homelessness — or to their abuser — if they lost their voucher.

HPD manages about 2,000 EHVs and plans to transition households to another federal rental assistance program. On the other hand, NYCHA administers 5,200 EHVs in our city. Among those households, 1,144 are domestic violence survivors and 600 are formerly homeless youth.

NYCHA has offered only one solution: apply to transfer to another unit within NYCHA’s portfolio. This means uprooting families who have finally found safety and are starting over. Moreover, NYCHA simply does not have enough available units to house all 5,200 EHV households. With a waitlist of over 182,000 households, many families could wait years with nowhere to go in the meantime.

CityFHEPS is the obvious solution for NYCHA EHV households — but eligibility currently requires a DHS shelter history, which excludes many EHV participants, particularly domestic violence survivors and youth. We urge the City to extend CityFHEPS eligibility to NYCHA EHV participants and fund it in the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget as part of the program’s larger expansion. By creating a dedicated eligibility category, all 5,200 households can seamlessly transition to CityFHEPS without anyone being forced back into homelessness. This would allow these families to stay in the homes where they have rebuilt their lives, prevent further instability for EHV recipients, and maintain the income stream for the thousands of landlords renting to these tenants.

 

Fix CityFHEPS and implement the expansion laws

While CityFHEPS has been a lifeline for domestic violence survivors and other New Yorkers in need of rental assistance, significant issues remain that delay move-ins, prolong shelter stays, frustrate landlords, and threaten housing stability. New Destiny published a full set of recommendations, Fixing CityFHEPS, drawn from the direct experience of our clients and housing navigators.

First and most urgently, we call on the administration to comply with the 2025 court ruling and implement the CityFHEPS expansion laws passed by the City Council in 2023. The sooner these laws are implemented, the faster we can reduce the number of households entering shelter — saving funding from the expensive shelter system and saving the lives of domestic violence survivors without a shelter history. Eligibility must also be expanded to include survivors fleeing domestic violence without requiring a shelter stay, and survivors regardless of immigration status or family size, ensuring equitable access for immigrant, LGBTQIA+, older adult, and trafficking survivors.

Beyond expansion, our recommendations address the operational failures that delay move-ins for months: investing in housing navigation by contracting with experienced providers — modeled after New Destiny’s EHV program, at a cost of only $4,250 per household placed, roughly 4% of the average annual shelter cost for a family with children; removing unnecessary disruptions to voucher issuance, including making eligibility and tenant share valid for at least one year; urgently investing in technology, including online application packages modeled after Section 8, real-time lease-up status for tenants and landlords, and fixing the system glitches that stop payments at the four-month mark; reducing package submission times through interagency data integration; expediting inspections by establishing a seven-day timeframe and passing Intro 1458 (Brewer); and securing committed units by continuing Unit Hold incentive payments until median lease-up time falls below one month.

 

Invest $10 million in the HOME+ program

In July 2024, ENDGBV launched a low-barrier flexible funding program, established by Local Law 112 of 2022, as part of HOME+ — a free citywide initiative that helps survivors of domestic violence stay safely housed through flexible funding grants, pendant alarm systems, and lock changes and repairs. The program works: between July 2024 and June 2025, 426 survivors received flexible funding grants averaging $2,055, disbursed on average within 19 days of application. Most grants went to housing retention and shelter prevention — proof that a modest, timely intervention can keep a survivor out of the shelter system entirely.

But the program reaches only a fraction of those who need it. In 2025, 15,362 survivors visited the city’s Family Justice Centers, and roughly 2,988 of them used the centers’ housing services — yet HOME+ flexible funding served just 426. The gap is one of resources, not need: the Fiscal Year 2025 flexible funding budget was only $1.2 million.

The program requires $10 million to operate as designed. After an 8% administrative set-aside and four full-time staff, a $10 million allocation would leave roughly $7.8 million for direct grants — enough to reach about 3,800 survivor-led households at the program’s average grant size. For many survivors, a single manageable expense is all that stands between stability and homelessness; HOME+ meets that moment for a fraction of the cost of shelter and rehousing. We urge the City to fund HOME+ at $10 million in the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget.

 

Strengthen Our Space and Expand NYC 15/15 for Single Survivors

We call on the city to enhance HPD’s Our Space program to ensure housing access and successful aftercare for survivors of domestic violence. This includes improving the Our Space referral system and allowing specialized service providers to support survivors’ transition from shelter to permanent housing.

We also urge the city to expand access to supportive housing, one of the most effective interventions for survivors with complex health and trauma needs. After years of advocacy from New Destiny and other organizations, the Adams administration included domestic violence survivors as an eligible population for NYC 15/15, the city’s latest supportive housing program. But a critical gap remains. Eligibility is still limited to survivors in families — even though half of all NYC domestic violence hotline callers are single survivors, including LGBTQIA+ survivors, trafficking survivors, and older adults, who rarely access shelter or permanent housing. NYC 15/15 eligibility must be expanded to include single adult survivors.

We thank you for your unending support for survivors of domestic violence reaching safety in stable housing. Your partnership is what makes our work possible. Thank you for the opportunity to submit written testimony.