In the waiting room at her doctor’s office in March, LaShonne received an email that still jolts her awake in the middle of the night.

It was from the New York City Housing Authority, telling her that a housing voucher program she relies on — which was supposed to be in place until 2030 — was going to run out of funding by the end of this year.

“The nurses had to come get me off the floor,” LaShonne, a domestic violence survivor who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy, told Bisnow. “I literally almost fell to my knees.”

Months later, she is still in limbo. Elected officials have set aside $264M to assist renters still relying on the Emergency Housing Voucher program, but the federal government is refusing to distribute the funding.

Tenants fear they could end up in shelters, while panicked landlords, caught between mounting expenses and diminishing capital reserves, try to figure out if they can afford to let vulnerable renters stay in their homes.

Emergency Housing Vouchers were introduced during the pandemic as a temporary measure to help vulnerable, low-income residents avoid eviction. The $5B program was intended to run for 10 years — hopefully long enough for working-class Americans to get back on their feet after the most economically devastating event since the 2008 financial crisis.

But apartment rents soared in the years that followed the pandemic.

The cost of a one-bedroom apartment in the 50 largest U.S. metro areas grew by 41% between 2020 and 2025, according to a study from loan marketplace LendingTree. And even as rent growth wanes nationally, 39 of the 50 metro areas tracked by Apartments.com recorded year-over-year rent increases in July.

The rapid increase in housing costs has exhausted the funding of vouchers four years early. Of the 70,000 vouchers HUD issued in 2021, almost 42,000 are still being used to lease apartments, according to federal data. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has said the vouchers won't be available after this year. 

Lawmakers have been trying to fix that. Earlier this year, Congress appropriated $264M for Tenant Protection Vouchers, a program that would help EHV holders stay in their homes. But HUD hasn’t issued the vouchers, with officials telling Gothamist last month that Congress didn’t specifically direct the agency to keep funding the program. 

“It's hard to not walk away from this feeling like HUD has just taken a position to end a very necessary program,” said Cathy Pennington, senior vice president and general manager at New York City nonprofit landlord and developer Phipps Houses.

HUD didn’t respond to a request for comment.

It isn’t just tenants who are afraid of the impacts of the funding drying up, said Rachel Fee, the executive director of nonprofit advocacy group the New York Housing Conference.

“The affordable housing owners who were leasing up buildings at the time these vouchers came online, they took tenants with these vouchers, really not understanding that this would be such a short-term subsidy,” she said. “These owners are really stressed out.”

The Senate on Sunday included new legal language in its appropriations bill compelling HUD to disburse the TPV funding. But the appropriations bill still needs to go back to the House and then to the president’s desk before the money is released. 

In some parts of the U.S., local authorities have found ways to ensure stability for tenants and landlords alike. Los Angeles County and Iowa have transitioned EHV holders to Section 8. Chicago has transferred them to the city’s housing choice vouchers. 

But not everywhere has found solutions.

San Diego County is set to run out of EHV dollars this fall and has 124,000 people on its waitlist for Section 8 housing, iNewsSource reported. Washington County, Oregon, is still trying to find funding to transfer tenants to a different voucher program, a spokesperson told Bisnow. In New York, landlords don’t know what to do. 

“People don't know what's coming next,” New York State Association for Affordable Housing President and CEO Carlina Rivera said. “The end of the year is going to be here before we know it.”

Some advocates pushed for EHV holders in NYC to be moved to a city-run rental assistance program called CityFHEPS. But the city council didn’t expand the program, which is the second-largest voucher program in the country. Instead, it created a different voucher program with $300M in funding over the next two years.

“Right now, everybody is really hoping that the federal government will come up with more money,” Fee said. “If that is not going to happen, or is not going to happen in a timely manner, we're really looking for the city housing agencies to come together.”

When asked for comment, Mayor Zohran Mamdani's office directed Bisnow to testimony from city housing agencies in June before the city council.

“This federal change has caused a crisis that is hitting cities around the country,” said Adam Phillips, first deputy commissioner of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development. “Some may be forced to take the most painful path — where voucherholders face a lapse in coverage and lose their housing.”

The city has directed its roughly 7,700 EHV recipients to apply for alternative voucher programs and has diverted some funding to cover costs. HUD rejected the city’s request to increase Section 8 funding.

In the meantime, pressure is mounting for New York’s affordable housing landlords.

A June survey by the NYC Housing Partnership found that, of 3,000 affordable housing owners, managers, lenders, investors and agencies, 61% said their portfolios’ financial health was deteriorating. No single respondent said it was improving.

Phipps Houses has a 441-unit building in Forest Hills with 27 EHV holders. Losing that income would blow a $220K annual hole in its budget, Pennington said. The only concrete action it has so far considered taking next year if it needs to tighten its belt is cutting porter shifts. 

The uncertainty around whether landlords will lose the voucher income is hurting affordable housing development and lending, Breaking Ground Senior Vice President of Development David Walsh said.

Investors in affordable housing developments depend on buildings being full to realize their investments in affordable housing tax credits.

But right now, the threat of losing vouchers is worrying investors and could undermine the stability of the affordable housing sector.

“That could be a huge hindrance to new deals getting done,” Walsh said, adding that in New York, there have been several affordable housing transactions that had “a very difficult time finding an investor to come in.”

Advocates also worry that an abrupt end to voucher funding will dissuade landlords from accepting these payments in the future, said Nicole Branca, CEO of nonprofit New Destiny Housing, which both provides homes for vulnerable New Yorkers and connects them to housing opportunities.

“The trust that we as a community will have ruined with these landlords will have a long-term ripple effect,” she said. “We know this because this happened once before.”

Three years after then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo cut funding for a housing program for homeless New Yorkers, forcing City Hall to end the program, a report from the nonprofit Coalition for the Homeless showed that half of all the families that had used the program ended up back in the city’s shelters.

“It took at least a decade for landlords to start working and trust government and government-contracted nonprofits,” Branca said.

For landlords, the prospect of losing voucher funding is heartbreaking.

“We never try to evict anybody,” Walsh said.

For tenants like LaShonne, it's terrifying.

“It’s horrible to not know what’s going to happen,” she said. “Who wants to be homeless?”

CORRECTION, AUG. 6, 11:10 A.M. ET: A previous version of this story misstated when a tenant received notice that her EHV voucher would lose funding. This story has been updated.