Testimony to the NYC Council Committees on General Welfare and Women and Gender Equity Joint Oversight Hearing on Housing Instability Among LGBTQ+ Individuals in NYC
Gabriela Sandoval Requena
Vice President of External Affairs
June 24, 2026
Thank you, Women and Gender Equity Committee Chair Farías, General Welfare Committee Chair Hudson, Council Members, and Council Central Staff, for the opportunity to submit written testimony for this important hearing.
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 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 Preliminary Fiscal Year 2026 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.
LGBTQ+ survivors face compounding barriers on top of these systemic failures. Single adult survivors — who disproportionately include LGBTQ+ survivors, trafficking survivors, and older adults — are the hardest to connect to shelter. In 2023, roughly half of all callers to the City’s 24-hour domestic violence hotline seeking shelter were single adults, yet only 18% were ultimately linked to a shelter bed. Of the 2,285 emergency shelter beds in New York City, only about 111 are designated for single survivors — a structural shortfall that leaves some of the most vulnerable New Yorkers with nowhere safe to go. According to The National LGBTQ Institute on Intimate Partner Violence’s 2024 National Field Needs Assessment, 72% of domestic violence service providers identify housing and homelessness as the most pressing need for LGBTQ+ survivors they serve, and anti-LGBTQ+ discrimination — including shelters that refuse to accept transgender survivors — compounds the barriers they already face.
Recommendations
We thank the City Council for your support of survivors of domestic violence in achieving safety through stable housing. Your advocacy on the creation of the ENDGBV flexible funding program (within HOME+), the CityFHEPS expansion, and increased funding for supportive housing has made a direct impact on survivors all over the city. We offer the following recommendations to strengthen and expand housing services for LGBTQ+ New Yorkers.
Fix CityFHEPS, Implement the Expansion, and Protect NYCHA EHV Households
We applaud the Council’s relentless leadership in advocating for the implementation of the 2023 CityFHEPS expansion laws. Under current rules, eligibility remains tied to a stay in the DHS system — excluding survivors who fled to HRA domestic violence shelters despite facing the same homelessness and the same housing need. This gap falls hardest on LGBTQ+ survivors and youth who avoid the adult shelter system altogether.
The stakes are clear: as advocates reminded us this Pride month, LGBTQ+ young people make up an estimated 40% of youth experiencing homelessness in New York City, despite representing roughly 10% of the youth population — a crisis concentrated among Black and brown young people, transgender and gender-nonconforming youth, and those cast out by families who refuse to accept who they are. As Safe Horizon has underscored, CityFHEPS vouchers would give homeless youth a real pathway out of homelessness rather than forcing them into a system they rightly fear.
The urgency extends to NYCHA’s 5,200 Emergency Housing Voucher households — including 1,144 domestic violence survivors and 600 runaway and homeless youth — whose federal vouchers were defunded by the Trump administration in 2025. NYCHA’s only proposed solution is an internal transfer, but the units aren’t there, and for survivors who have built safety around their current homes, schools, and support networks, an involuntary move is its own form of harm. The city must extend CityFHEPS eligibility to NYCHA EHV participants as part of the program’s larger expansion and fund it in the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget. A coalition of nearly 350 organizations and directly impacted New Yorkers has called on the mayor to act — we refer the Committees to the sign-on letter included as an addendum to this testimony — and we urge this Council to do the same.
Expanding eligibility is only the first step. While CityFHEPS has been a lifeline for survivors and other New Yorkers in need of rental assistance, significant operational failures continue to delay move-ins, prolong shelter stays, and frustrate landlords and tenants alike. New Destiny published a full set of recommendations in Fixing CityFHEPS, updated in June 2026, and we refer the Committees to that document for the full set of operational reforms.
Invest $10 million in the HOME+ Program
HOME+ is one of the few programs built around survivors’ realities rather than system requirements. The free citywide initiative — created by the Council under Local Law 112 of 2022 and launched by ENDGBV in July 2024 — provides flexible funding grants, pendant alarm systems, and lock changes and repairs to help survivors of domestic violence stay safely in the homes and communities they choose. Crucially, it requires no documentation, no order of protection, and no clean credit or criminal history, and eligibility is unaffected by immigration status. For LGBTQ+ survivors, undocumented survivors, and others shut out of federally funded programs, it is often the only door open.
The program works. In its first year, 93.7% of survivors who were stably housed when they received a grant remained in their homes — for an average of $2,055 per household, delivered within 19 days. Among survivors who were in a domestic violence shelter when they applied, nearly one in four moved into permanent housing. This is prevention at its most cost-effective: on average, family shelter costs the city close to $100,000 per family per year; HOME+ costs a fraction of that.
But the program reaches only a fraction of those who need it. Of the 15,362 survivors who visited the city’s Family Justice Centers in 2025, 2,988 sought housing help — yet HOME+ served just 426, constrained by a budget of $1,125,000 and provider understaffing that slowed disbursement. The gap is one of resources, not need.
Full funding at $10 million would change that. After staffing — four full-time staff per borough to clear the disbursement bottleneck — and an administrative set-aside, roughly $7.9 million would go directly to grants, enough to reach approximately 3,845 survivor-led households. For many survivors, a single unpaid bill is all that stands between stability and the shelter system. HOME+ meets that moment quickly and on survivors’ own terms. We urge the City to fund HOME+ at $10 million in the Fiscal Year 2027 Budget, and we refer the Committees to the coalition memo included as an addendum to this testimony.
Expand NYC 15/15 Supportive Housing for Single Survivors
We urge the city to expand access to supportive housing, one of the most effective interventions for survivors with complex health and trauma needs. In 2024, the Adams administration included domestic violence survivors as an eligible population for NYC 15/15 — a hard-won victory. But the program remains limited to survivors in families, leaving single survivors behind. This gap falls hardest on those who most need it: LGBTQ+ survivors, trafficking survivors, and older adults make up roughly half of all NYC domestic violence hotline callers, yet rarely access shelter or permanent housing. The Mamdani administration should build on its predecessor’s progress and expand NYC 15/15 eligibility to include single adult survivors.
We thank you for your unwavering support for survivors of domestic violence reaching safety in stable housing. Your partnership — and this hearing — signal that LGBTQ+ survivors of domestic violence are not invisible to this Council. That matters.