A person or family, regardless of their immigration status, could be eligible for the voucher if they don’t have a home or are about to lose their housing, and if they make less than 50 percent of the Area Median Income ($77,650 for a family of four in New York City).

An apartment building in the Bronx. (Photo by Adi Talwar)

After years of calls for a statewide rent voucher program for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness, Gov. Kathy Hochul announced her commitment to launching a pilot program for the Housing Voucher Access Program (HAVP) last week.

While the State and Assembly’s budget proposals sought $250 million for HAVP this year, the state budget deal included just $50 million to cover the first year of the four-year program, which would run from March 1, 2026 and end on May 1, 2030. Funding for the remaining three years will be negotiated in future budgets, officials said.

State Sen. Brian Kavanagh and Assemblymember Linda Rosenthal—who chair their respective houses’ housing committees—sponsored a version of the HAVP bill for the last few years, which shaped the final language included in the budget.

Here’s what we know about how HAVP would work so far, and what is yet to be determined.

Who will be eligible? 

A person or family, regardless of their immigration status, could be eligible for the voucher if they don’t have a home or are about to lose their housing. They also need to earn no more than 50 percent of the Area Median Income (AMI). In New York City, that would be less than $77,650 for a family of four, as defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

Both Rosenthal and Kavanagh’s offices said it has not yet been determined how much money will go to New York City and other localities, but said the amount may be calculated based on the proportion of severely rent-burdened households in each area.

“Priority shall be given to applicants who are homeless,” reads the budget bill establishing the program’s perimeters. The state Department of Housing and Community Renewal (HCR) commissioner has the discretion to establish further priorities as appropriate, the bill notes.

There were more than 130,000 people in New York City’s shelter system in January, including around 46,000 asylum seekers and immigrants, according to data tracked by City Limits.

Who will be in charge?

HCR will run the pilot program, and will define the specifics and documentation needed to apply. Rosenthal explained that of the $50 million available, 10 percent will go to administrative costs such as outreach, staff, program design, and other materials.

HCR will also coordinate with public housing agencies and local administrators in the state to distribute the vouchers. In the city, it could be the Housing Authority (NYCHA) and the Department of Housing and Development (HPD). 

City Limits asked all three agencies for more details about the pilot program, but did not receive additional information beyond what was included in the budget bill.

“I spoke to HPD, and they’re very eager to get started,” Rosenthal said.

How will the vouchers work? 

Voucher holders will contribute about 30 percent of their household’s monthly adjusted income on rent, and the voucher will cover the rest. Its value will be set between 90 and 120 percent of the fair market rent for the rental area. The vouchers will remain valid as long as funding is available, Rosenthal explained.

The New York State Child Poverty Reduction Advisory Council estimates that such a voucher program could help reduce poverty across the state.

Like federal Section 8 vouchers, the HAVP administrator will issue payments directly to the owner of the unit under contract. While the Section 8 voucher was used as a model for HAVP, having one of these vouchers excludes having the other, so people can only have one.

New York City also has its own voucher program called the City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement (CityFHEPS), to help families move out of shelters and into permanent housing. 

More than 55,000 households are receiving CityFHEPS vouchers currently, and the city is projected to spend $1.25 billion on the program this fiscal year—significantly more than the $50 million allocated for the statewide HAVP.

Hochul, who until this year had resisted the proposal, said last month that the state would be “moderating the cost and keeping an eye on the program.”

“This has potential to escalate a great deal,” she told reporters at the time. 

CityFHEPS works similarly to Section 8, though has been criticized for lack of consistency in making payments—something state lawmakers are mindful of in launching the new program.

“I think HCR is going to learn the lessons that are blatant through the city’s lack of finesse in administering CityFHEPS,” Rosenthal said. “There are reporting requirements that weren’t in the initial bill that we insisted be attached, so we can get more data and tailor it. See where it’s working, see where it needs improvement.”

What’s next?

Vouchers should be available for use starting March 1, 2026.

The first annual report on voucher pilot implementation should be available on Nov. 1, 2026. It will detail the amount of funding allocated for each county, number of voucher applicants, number of people on waiting lists, number of voucher beneficiaries, and data about the homeless population receiving vouchers, among other data points. A report will be published every year until the pilot program ends.

To reach the reporter behind this story, contact Daniel@citylimits.org. To reach the editor, contact Jeanmarie@citylimits.org

Want to republish this story? Find City Limits’ reprint policy here.

The post Here’s What We Know So Far About New York’s New Housing Voucher Program appeared first on City Limits.

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — Authorities in Louisiana say they are in pursuit of 10 inmates — at least one of whom is convicted of murder — who escaped from a New Orleans jail. Another inmate was captured Friday after a brief foot chase through the French Quarter, the Louisiana State Police said in a post on the social media platform X.

Authorities first noticed the 11 inmates were missing during a Friday morning headcount.

One of the fugitive inmates, Derrick Groves, was convicted on two charges of second-degree murder and two charges of attempted second-degree murder last year for his role in the 2018 Mardi Gras Day shootings of two men. Groves also faces a charge of battery against a correctional facility employee, court records show.

Orleans Parish Sheriff Susan Hutson said the department is actively working with local, state and federal law enforcement agencies to search for the escaped inmates.

“We are launching a full investigation to determine how this escape occurred, including reviewing facility protocols, staff performance and physical security measures,” Hutson said. “Any lapses or failures that contributed to this incident will be addressed swiftly and with full accountability.”

Investigators are focusing on an opening inside a cell through which at least one inmate is believed to have escaped into a maintenance corridor, according to one current and one former law enforcement official who were not authorized to discuss the ongoing investigation and spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.

“That’s how they escaped,” the current official said, adding investigators were reviewing surveillance footage that captured the jailbreak.

The AP obtained a photograph the current law enforcement official confirmed shows the opening in question. A former law enforcement official who worked in the jail for several years said such an opening — of just a few feet — would typically be covered by a sink and toilet that may have been removed in this case.

Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill called the escape “beyond unacceptable” and said local authorities had waited too long to inform the public.

“Someone clearly dropped the ball and there’s no excuse for this,” Murrill said in an emailed statement. “My office will do whatever it takes to determine how this happened and make sure that it won’t happen again.”

New Orleans Police Department Superintendent Anne Kirkpatrick said her agency has put “a full court effort” to respond to the escape and are working with the FBI and U.S. marshals.

“It’s more than likely that someone had help and they are not running around in a jumpsuit — but if they are, you’re going to stand out,” she said.

Officers were focused on identifying and providing protection for individuals who may have testified in their cases or may be in danger. One family has been “removed” from their home, Kirkpatrick said.

“If there is anyone helping or harboring these escapees, you will be charged,” Kirkpatrick added.

Associated Press writer Jim Mustian contributed to this report.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE, Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — The internet wouldn’t be the same without the Like button, the thumbs-up icon that Facebook and other online services turned into digital catnip.

Like it or not, the button has served as a creative catalyst, a dopamine delivery system and an emotional battering ram. It also became an international tourist attraction after Facebook plastered the symbol on a giant sign on that stood outside its Silicon Valley headquarters until the company rebranded itself as Meta Platforms in 2021.

A new book, “Like: The Button That Changed The World,” delves into the convoluted story behind a symbol that’s become both the manna and bane of a digitally driven society.

It’s a tale that traces back to gladiator battles for survival during the Roman empire before fast-forwarding to the early 21st century when technology trailblazers such as Yelp co-founder Russ Simmons, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone, PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, YouTube co-founder Steve Chen, and Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit were experimenting with different ways using the currency of recognition to prod people to post compelling content online for free.

Related Articles

Isabel Allende has a new novel and a message: Don’t give up

Book Review: Ron Chernow’s ‘Mark Twain’ gives readers an honest assessment of beloved author’s life

Park Grove Library to close for $13.5M redesign; open house set

Literary calendar for week of May 11

Readers and writers: Exploring up north, from flowers to lighthouses

As part of that noodling, a Yelp employee named Bob Goodson sat down on May 18, 2005, and drew a crude sketch of thumbs up and thumbs down gesture as a way for people to express their opinions about restaurant reviews posted on the site. Yelp passed on adopting Goodson’s suggested symbol and, instead, adopted the “useful,” “funny” and “cool” buttons conceived by Simmons. But the discovery of that old sketch inspired Goodson to team up with Martin Reeves to explore how the Like button came to be in their new book.

“It’s something simple and also elegant because the Like button says, ‘I like you, I like your content. And I am like you. I like you because I am like you, I am part of your tribe,’ ” Reeves said during an interview with The Associated Press. “But it’s very hard to answer the simple question, ‘Well, who invented the Like button?’ ”

The social wellspring behind a social symbol

Although Facebook is the main reason the Like button became so ubiquitous, the company didn’t invent it and almost discarded it as drivel. It took Facebook nearly two years to overcome the staunch resistance by CEO Mark Zuckerberg before finally introducing the symbol on its service on February 9, 2009 — five years after the social network’s creation in a Harvard University dorm room.

As happens with many innovations, the Like button was born out of necessity but it wasn’t the brainchild of a single person. The concept percolated for more than a decade in a Silicon Valley before Facebook finally embraced it.

“Innovation is often social and Silicon Valley was the right place for all this happen because it has a culture of meet-ups, although it’s less so now,” Reeves said. “Everyone was getting together to talk about what they were working on at that time and it turned out a lot of them were working on the same stuff.”

The effort to create a simple mechanism to digitally express approval or dismay sprouted from a wellspring of online services such as Yelp and YouTube whose success would hinge on their ability to post commentary or video that would help make their sites even more popular without forcing them to spend a lot of money for content. That effort required a feedback loop that wouldn’t require a lot of hoops to navigate.

Hollywood’s role in the Like button’s saga

And when Goodson was noodling around with his thumbs-up and thumbs-down gesture, it didn’t come out of a vacuum. Those techniques of signaling approval and disapproval had been ushered into the 21st century zeitgeist by the Academy Award-winning movie, “Gladiator,” where Emperor Commodus — portrayed by actor Joaquin Phoenix — used the gestures to either spare or slay combatants in the arena.

But the positive feelings conjured by a thumbs up date even further back in popular culture, thanks to the 1950s-era character Fonzie played by Henry Winkler in the top-rated 1970s TV series, “Happy Days.” The gesture later became a way of expressing delight with a program via a remote control button for the digital video recorders made by TiVO during the early 2000s. Around the same time, Hot or Not — a site that solicited feedback on the looks of people who shared photos of themselves — began playing around with ideas that helped inspire the Like button, based on the book’s research.

Others that contributed to the pool of helpful ideas included the pioneering news service Digg, the blogging platform Xanga, YouTube and another early video site, Vimeo.

The button’s big breakthrough

But Facebook unquestionably turned the Like button into a universally understood symbol, while also profiting the most from its entrance into the mainstream. And it almost didn’t happen.

By 2007, Facebook engineers had been tinkering with a Like button, but Zuckerberg opposed it because he feared the social network was already getting too cluttered and, Reeves said, “is he didn’t actually want to do something that would be seen as trivial, that would cheapen the service.”

But FriendFeed, a rival social network created by Buchheit and now OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, had no such qualms, and unveiled its own Like button in October 2007.

But the button wasn’t successful enough to keep the lights on at FriendFeed, and the service ended up being acquired by Facebook. By the time that deal was completed, Facebook had already introduced a Like button — only after Zuckerberg rebuffed the original idea of calling it an Awesome button “because nothing is more awesome than awesome,” according to the book’s research.

Once Zuckerberg relented, Facebook quickly saw that the Like button not only helped keep its audience engaged on its social network but also made it easier to divine people’s individual interests and gather the insights required to sell the targeted advertising that accounted for most of Meta Platform’s $165 billion in revenue last year. The button’s success encouraged Facebook to take things even further by allowing other digital services to ingrain it into their feedback loops and then, in 2016, added six more types of emotions — “love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.”

Facebook hasn’t publicly disclosed how many responses it has accumulated from the Like button and its other related options, but Levchin told the book’s authors that he believes the company has probably logged trillions of them. “What content is liked by humans…is probably one of the singularly most valuable things on the internet,” Levchin said in the book.

The Like button also has created an epidemic of emotional problems, especially among adolescents, who feel forlorn if their posts are ignored and narcissists whose egos feast on the positive feedback. Reeves views those issues as part of the unintentional consequences that inevitably happen because “if you can’t even predict the beneficial effects of a technological innovation how could you possibly forecast the side effects and the interventions?”

Even so, Reeves believes the Like button and the forces that coalesced to create it tapped into something uniquely human.

“We thought serendipity of the innovation was part of the point,” Reeves said. “And I don’t think we can get bored with liking or having our capacity to compliment taken away so easily because it’s the product of 100,000 years of evolution.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to allow him to resume his downsizing of the federal workforce, while a lawsuit filed by labor unions and cities proceeds.

Related Articles

Trump suspends asylum system, leaving immigrants to face an uncertain future

Trump’s Mideast trip splashes out on deals and diplomacy but is quiet on human rights

Opulence, business deals and a $400M plane from Qatar: Takeaways from Trump’s Mideast tour

Harvard researcher charged with trying to smuggle frog embryos to be transferred to Massachusetts

Egg prices finally dropped, but the cost of beef hit a record high last month. Here’s how everyday prices are changing under Trump.

The Justice Department is challenging an order issued last week by a federal judge in San Francisco that temporarily halted Trump’s efforts to shrink a federal government he calls bloated and expensive.

U.S. District Judge Susan Illston’s temporary restraining order questioned whether Trump’s Republican administration was acting lawfully in trying to pare the federal workforce.

Illston, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton, directed numerous federal agencies to stop acting on Trump’s workforce executive order signed in February and a subsequent memo issued by the Department of Government Efficiency and the Office of Personnel Management.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the court to quickly put the ruling on hold, telling the justices that Illston overstepped her authority.

Illston’s order expires next week, unless extended.

The case is the latest in a string of emergency appeals the Trump administration has made to the Supreme Court, including some related to firings. The administration separately has filed an emergency appeal with the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which has yet to act.

Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired, have left their jobs via deferred resignation programs or have been placed on leave as a result of Trump’s government-shrinking efforts. There is no official figure for the job cuts, but at least 75,000 federal employees took deferred resignation, and thousands of probationary workers have already been let go.

In her order, Illston gave several examples to show the impact of the downsizing. One union that represents federal workers who research health hazards faced by mine workers said it was poised to lose 221 of 222 workers in the Pittsburgh office; a Vermont farmer didn’t receive a timely inspection on his property to receive disaster aid after flooding and missed an important planting window; a reduction in Social Security Administration workers has led to longer wait times for recipients.

Among the agencies affected by the temporary restraining order are the departments of Agriculture, Energy, Labor, the Interior, State, the Treasury and Veterans Affairs. It also applies to the National Science Foundation, Small Business Association, Social Security Administration and Environmental Protection Agency.

Plaintiffs include the cities of San Francisco, Chicago and Baltimore; the labor group American Federation of Government Employees; and the nonprofit groups Alliance for Retired Americans, Center for Taxpayer Rights and Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.

Some of the labor unions and nonprofit groups are also plaintiffs in another lawsuit before a San Francisco judge challenging the mass firings of probationary workers. In that case, Judge William Alsup ordered the government in March to reinstate those workers, but the U.S. Supreme Court later blocked his order.