A New Legal Threat to Voucher Holders’ Housing Rights

This story was co-published in collaboration with Shelterforce, the only independent, non-academic publication covering the worlds of affordable housing, community development and housing justice. Seven years after New York state made it illegal for landlords to reject housing vouchers, the state attorney general’s office has been steadily cracking down on violators despite multiple legal challenges that threaten the law’s existence. A 2023 lower court decision found aspects of the 2019 law unconstitutional, but the case has been back and forth in appeals for more than three years. “It’s created this uncertainty,” says Eric Dunn, director of litigation at the National Housing Law Project (NHLP). Most recently, a March 2026 decision by the New York State Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, Third Department upheld the lower court’s decision, surprising some housing attorneys. Attorneys tell Next City/Shelterforce that the decision has emboldened landlords, not just in New York but across the country, to mount a constitutional defense when source-of-income violations are brought against them. In 2022, Attorney General Letitia James sought civil penalties against Ithaca Renting Company, which owns hundreds of units in Tompkins County, accusing it of violating the state’s 2019 law. The company sued, arguing that its property rights under the Fourth Amendment are violated when it is forced to accept housing vouchers. No federal law bans landlords from rejecting tenants based on their use of Section 8 vouchers. Also called Housing Choice Vouchers, tenant-based Section 8 allows low-income tenants to pay no more than 30% of their income toward rent, with the federal government paying the difference to the landlord. New York’s source of income protections don’t just cover Section 8, but the CityFHEPS voucher, social security payments and other government subsidies. Yet landlords often refuse to accept vouchers. A report by the Community Service Society and Unlock NYC found more than 2,000 crowdsourced reports of landlords refusing to rent to tenants because of their housing vouchers in New York City. Twenty-four states and 150 counties or municipalities have source-of-income discrimination laws on the books, according to Heather Abraham, an associate professor of law at the University at Buffalo School of Law and the director of its Civil Rights and Housing Clinic. According to Abraham, 60% of voucher holders live in areas covered by source-of-income protections. In 2019, New York state amended its human rights law to prohibit source-of-income discrimination, including refusing to rent to someone because they use a housing voucher. The June 2023 Cortland County Supreme Court decision in People v Commons West, issued by Judge Mark E. Masler, found the law unconstitutional because the Section 8 program requires a government inspection of the relevant housing unit. Every landlord participating in the program must sign a Housing Assistance Payment contract with a public housing agency, which authorizes consent to future searches of their property. Judge Masler said that mandating this inspection violates “a property owner’s Fourth Amendment Rights by giving [them] no choice but to consent to these inspections.” According to Dunn of NHLP, the court’s interpretation of the law misrepresents how Section 8 inspections actually work. The inspections are arranged with landlords, whose consent and coordination are required for inspectors to enter the building. He knows of no examples in which state agencies have relied on police to break down a door and force an inspection. While landlords are compelled to allow inspectors in, this should be a “reasonable” search under the law, he argues. “If the landlord doesn’t cooperate with that, then the inspection just never takes place,” Dunn says. “They can’t send in a SWAT team to do an inspection over the landlord’s objection.” He says the only reason why a landlord would object to an inspection is that they don’t want to comply. “A lot of landlords just hate source-of-income laws,” Dunn says. New York Attorney General Letitia James speaks during a press briefing, Feb. 16, 2024, in New York. (Photo by Bebeto Matthews / AP) New York State Homes and Community Renewal changed its policies in response to the 2023 decision, providing an administrative process for landlords to object to a search. Attorney General Letitia James’s office also appealed to the same judge, but Masler rejected the appeal in December 2024. These decisions banned enforcement of the law, but only in Tompkins County, where both decisions were issued, and only for Section 8 vouchers, according to Heather Abraham. James’s office then appealed the decision to the state Supreme Court’s Appellate Division, Third Department, which covers a large swath of upstate New York. But in March, the court rejected that appeal, saying the law was unconstitutional. The court acknowledged that the state was in a housing crisis, and that “expanding voucher acceptance is essential to achieving the remedial purpose of the federal program upon which hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers rely.” However, the court privileged landlords’ right not to hypothetically have someone evaluate their apartment for suitability over those concerns, arguing that this was an unreasonable search and seizure. James’s office released a statement saying it was reviewing the decision, without clarifying whether the state would appeal. It eventually filed another appeal on April 1. In the weeks after the decision and before the attorney general’s appeal, the state was unable to enforce source-of-income discrimination laws for Section 8 holders, although it is not clear legally if those limitations covered only the court’s jurisdiction or the entire state. The ruling applied only to those federal vouchers, not to local or state vouchers — like CityFHEPS — that don’t have the same inspection requirements, according to Abraham of the University at Buffalo School of Law. It’s also unclear whether any of the court decisions would extend to all of New York state, she says, because the reach of lower and intermediate court decisions in New York state is ambiguous under the law. (Despite the name, the New York State Supreme Court’s appellate division is an intermediate appellate court, and the Third Department that issued the ruling covers only part of the state.) The decision was stayed after being appealed to the New York State Court of Appeals in April, meaning the 2019 law can still be enforced. When asked by Next City/Shelterforce for a list of lawsuits and investigations related to the 2019 source of income law, the attorney general’s office sent a list of linked press releases. They included only one lawsuit: the 2022 case that led to the Commons West decision the following year. The AG’s office linked to six settlements it reached with landlords since 2022, all of which it said were initiated by investigations. How New York can set precedent Despite the limited direct impact of the rulings, the People v Commons West decision has had ripple effects across New York state and the country. The University at Buffalo has counted 12 cases nationwide since the 2023 decision in which landlords have argued that a source-of-income law violates their Fourth Amendment rights. They include cases in Lincoln, Nebraska, and in Illinois, where a landlord company is arguing that both Chicago’s and Illinois’s source-of-income laws are unconstitutional. In a Lawrence, Kansas, case, a landlord group’s appeals were rejected in May 2025, two years after the city passed its source-of-income protections. Kansas City, Missouri, passed a source-of-income law in January 2024, but a Fourth Amendment challenge led to a preliminary injunction blocking the law the following month. The law’s death knell was a May 2025 law that prevented any locality in the state from enforcing source-of-income protections. Abraham says some New York landlords were under the impression that the 2019 source-of-income law had been shot down statewide. “What I think is most important, factually, about what happened [after the March 2026 decision] is that a lot of landlords and property owners all told each other ‘We won, we got an appellate court to say this is our right,’” Abraham says. The National Apartment Association, one of the city’s largest landlord lobbies, issued a public statement about the decision in March. The headline only says that the law remains unconstitutional in an appellate ruling, though the text clarifies that “housing providers in New York City are still subject to the city’s source-of-income antidiscrimination law,” and that the state attorney general could still appeal the decision. Abraham says the decision may also be having a chilling effect on legislators across the country, who now worry that any newly passed source-of-income law will be immediately challenged. “I imagine there are a lot of legislators who just want to wait rather than spend a lot of their political capital or time trying to move something forward that could be invalidated later,” she says. Housing Rights Initiative, a nonprofit that has collaborated with the state attorney general’s office to bring source-of-income lawsuits, says it filed hundreds of such lawsuits prior to the New York Supreme Court’s March ruling. The organization says it is cautiously optimistic that the ruling will be narrowed or reversed. But Abraham stresses that housing attorneys in several states are fighting these landlord cases to establish a strong precedent for source-of-income protections. James, for example, has reached settlements in five source-of-income cases since the decision, according to her office. These include a legal agreement reached in October 2023 over an investigation that began in 2021; a February 2024 agreement with a New Rochelle landlord who agreed to pay $40,000 to the state and accept Section 8 tenants; and an August 2024 agreement in which a landlord of mostly rent-stabilized units in Harlem and Brooklyn agreed to pay $400,000 to potential renters who were denied housing because of their voucher status and to rent at least 65 units to tenants with housing vouchers. Abraham notes the appointment of Amanda Meyer as special counsel for fair housing within the Office of the New York Attorney General. This is a newly created role, wrote Madilyn Somers, deputy press secretary, in an email. A job description says the special counsel leads the attorney general’s housing discrimination lawsuits, along with drafting public recommendations and comments. “I think she’s very interested in doing everything the state can to enforce existing fair housing laws and strengthen them,” Abraham says. In the meantime, anyone who believes they have faced source-of-income discrimination in New York state can file a complaint with the state attorney general’s office. This article is part of Backyard, a newsletter exploring scalable solutions to make housing fairer, more affordable and more environmentally sustainable. Subscribe to our weekly Backyard newsletter. Roshan Abraham is a contributing editor for housing and homelessness at Next City. Based in Queens, New York, he has written extensively about city policy, including prisons and policing, housing and homelessness for The Guardian, The New York Times, Slate, The Baffler, Village Voice, The Verge, Pacific Standard, The Appeal, Vice and other outlets. At Vice, he was formerly a staff writer covering the housing beat. He is a former Open City Fellow and Witness Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop and a former Equitable Cities Fellow at Next City. Add to the Discussion Next City sustaining members can comment on our stories. Keep the discussion going! Join our community of engaged members by donating today. Already a sustaining member? Login here.