The New York City agency responsible for enforcing local anti-discrimination laws has been beset by staff attrition and is, in some instances, prematurely closing cases without fully investigating allegations, leaving in question the effectiveness of the myriad laws that advocates have said would be the strongest in the country if they were fully enforced.

Other discrimination claims lodged with the City Commission on Human Rights, or CCHR, have been delayed by increased caseloads for a reduced number of staffers, affecting the agency’s ability to tackle one of its key remits: stopping landlords and brokers who refuse to rent to New Yorkers who receive government assistance to pay their rent.

“They were just like, we got the information but basically, that’s about as much as we can do,” said Kamilah Newton, a Bronx resident who lodged a discrimination claim against one broker that she said was never fully resolved by the commission.

“There are no consequences for this stuff,” she said, adding that numerous brokers and landlords refused to rent to her as a housing voucher holder — a potential violation of city and state laws — and that the agency finally took action on her behalf in another case.

The cause of the disruption, according to current and former workers, is a severe staffing shortage that was aggravated by the mayor’s decision to eliminate another 20 positions from the agency earlier this year.

The commission’s law enforcement arm currently has roughly 70% fewer staff attorneys — who handle the bulk of the agency’s investigative work — than the agency had in 2017, according to data from the city’s Independent Budget Office and Local 237, a city employees’ union.

Many current and former staff members who spoke with Gothamist did not want to be identified out of fear of retaliation or reputational damage for speaking about the agency’s inner workings.

In a written statement, CCHR spokesperson Claire Gross said the agency is “comprised of dedicated individuals who work diligently to cultivate a city where everyone can live, work and thrive free from discrimination.”

“A ‘lack of resources’ is a mischaracterization of our approach to cases,” she said.

The budget deal that Mayor Eric Adams agreed with the City Council last week provides the commission with 17 new positions for the unit charged with enforcing the laws that prohibit landlords and real estate brokers from discriminating against housing voucher holders – otherwise known as “source-of-income discrimination.”

The unit has been especially hindered by the staffing shortage, and several former agency staffers accused the commission’s leadership of not prioritizing housing discrimination cases.

At a low point last year, the agency had no staff working exclusively on source-of-income enforcement for several months, according to a former staffer and testimony from CCHR Commissioner Annabel Palma at a May 9 City Council hearing.

“We were here last year and we did not have staff members dedicated to [source-of-income discrimination], ” Palma said.

The unit has since gained at least nine employees – most of whom were transferred from a different city agency. However, staffers said it’s not nearly enough to address the hundreds of source-of-income discrimination claims it receives each year from across the city.

Stephanie Rudolph, an attorney who led CCHR’s source-of-income discrimination unit until 2020, criticized city officials for not providing additional funding for the agency sooner, and urged the commission to stick by its plan to dedicate all the new positions to combating voucher discrimination.

“[The Commission] was given these immense powers and immense responsibilities without really any resources,” Rudolph said.

The agency’s investigative branch currently has only 14 staff attorneys, down from an all-time agency high of 49 roughly six years ago. It last had this few staff attorneys in 2014, union data shows.

“There's an incredible amount of need for New Yorkers to have their discrimination issues taken seriously and investigated robustly, and there’s just not enough people,” said one former agency attorney, who did not want to be identified because they still work in human rights law.

Prematurely closing cases

In March, City Comptroller Brad Lander’s office issued a report praising CCHR and other understaffed agencies for having “maintained progress on their goals at a high level despite high vacancy rates.”

Among the comptroller’s list of indicators for what it called a “success rate” was the agency’s proficiency in closing cases, giving the impression that the commission continues to fully investigate the majority of the cases it receives. The comptroller’s report also projected that the agency’s success rate would reach 100% during the last fiscal year.

However, agency data shows that most cases – 56% in the fiscal year ending in 2022 – were administratively closed, or AC’d in the agency’s vernacular, meaning the commission declined to make determinations as to whether or not there was probable cause in discrimination allegations.

Under city law, the commission can administratively close cases at any time for any reason, including if the complainant can no longer be found, a case sat idle for 180 days, or if a case requires what it determines to be a “disproportionate investment” of agency resources.

Some staffers who spoke with Gothamist said administrative case closures were a necessary reality to clear the backlog given the agency’s skeletal staff, and that some cases would require months of investigation to get a clear outcome.

Others described an urgency within the commission to close out cases before the end of the year, even if investigations were moving at a rapid pace. Former staff speculated the pressure was to improve performance data used in the mayor's biannual management report — figures that were ultimately used in the Comptroller's assessment

“The pressure is from above — the mayor pressures the commissioner, the deputy commissioner, the supervisors and the staff attorneys to move things fast,” said one former staffer.

“Some people had the attitude, we don’t have the staff capacity to litigate complaints and we have to get as many dismissed as possible,” said a former attorney.

The agency did not provide comment on former staff members’ allegations that they were pressured by management to close out cases prematurely.

While an administrative closure by the human rights commission still allows someone to bring their case to state or federal court, those venues can be more difficult to navigate without an attorney.

Attorneys at the commission act as neutral investigators while digging into discrimination claims, representing neither the complainant, landlord or other parties.

“We were doing a disservice to really everybody involved, complainants and respondents, by ACing as many cases as we do,” said another former attorney with the agency.

CCHR’s authority allows it to bring cases where it’s found “probable cause” of discrimination to the city’s Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, or OATH, which is separate from the state court system and has the power to rule on the agency’s cases against landlords, brokers and others accused of violations.

But agency data shows the commission referred just four cases to OATH during the fiscal year ending in 2022. That’s down from 13 in the previous year, and 20 in the fiscal year ending in 2020.

“I felt that we should be bringing as many [cases] as possible to hearings, whether we win or not,” said one former attorney. “Complainants deserve some degree of closure and our job is to move these forward.”

In response to a question from Gothamist about whether the comptroller’s office stood by its assessment of the human rights commission’s performance, Chloe Chik, a spokesperson for Lander, said: “Our report examined an agency’s workforce vacancy rate compared to their own self-reported metrics, but our office did not independently investigate on what an agency is doing in order to meet their own self-reported outcomes.”

The most common form of housing discrimination

When Newton and her then-2-year-old son received a housing voucher issued by a city-run program known as CityFHEPS, she thought it was their ticket out of a homeless shelter. The program is designed to help New Yorkers out of shelters and into homes.

“I remember definitely feeling like I'll be able to take care of myself,” said Newton, who grew up in the Bronx. “You know, me and my son can have somewhere that's clean and safe.”

But complaints she lodged with the human rights commission, which were reviewed by Gothamist, show the reality was far different.

Newton, 28, said she contacted hundreds of listings, only to have her calls go unanswered by landlords and brokers once they learned she received rental assistance.

Refusing to show or rent an apartment because a renter uses housing vouchers is illegal under city law. And yet, it’s “the most common form of illegal housing bias in New York City,” according to Jessica Valencia, head of communications at the housing nonprofit Unlock NYC. Its research on city complaint data shows voucher discrimination is particularly widespread in many of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.

In one case last year, Newton requested information for seven apartments listed by a Bronx broker, according to an email she sent to CCHR complaining of the broker’s conduct.

In her correspondence with the agency, Newton alleged that the broker gave her the wrong address for an apartment viewing, and explicitly told her that the landlords he worked with did not accept her voucher.

The broker did not respond to a request for comment from Gothamist.

In an email to the commission, Newton expressed interest in securing one of the apartment listings with the agency’s help. The commission has broad powers to initiate complaints and to quickly assist tenants in addressing source-of-income discrimination using what it calls “pre-complaint interventions,” which can include contacting brokers and landlords to inform them that they may have broken the law.

Email records show that an agency staffer then tried to contact the broker, but later closed the intervention because he did not respond.

“He don’t pick up the phone calls or he don’t respond to the emails and it’s like, they can’t go to his house,” said Newton.

Newton then accepted an invitation from a commission staffer to file a formal complaint with the commission, an email shows, which would require an agency attorney to call her back. But according to Newton, she never heard anything further from the commission about the case.

At the time, wait times to receive a call back from an agency attorney ranged between four to six months, according to one former staffer and housing advocates.

CCHR declined to discuss the intervention.

Newton believes that the staff shortage within the commission's source-of-income unit at the time prevented her case from being meaningfully investigated, and that the agency is not acting as a deterrent to those who violate the city’s anti-discrimination laws.

Increasing workloads

Gross, the commission’s spokesperson, said the agency has the staff it needs to fulfill its mandate, and that staff from outside its source-of-income unit continued to investigate cases in which voucher-holders were refused even when the unit’s personnel was at a low point.

But current and former staffers who spoke with Gothamist have described increasing caseloads for the few attorneys remaining at the agency – as many as 80 for one former attorney – which they said snowballed into more work every time another employee left.

One staffer described seeing a colleague with their arms full of case files after they inherited a recently departed attorney’s work.

Adams’ latest assessment of how city agencies are functioning, known as the Mayor’s Management Report, states that the lack of attorneys and other staff has lengthened the timeline for cases. On average, commission complaints take nearly two years to resolve, while pre-complaint interventions, which are supposed to be rapid, take just over six months, according to data from 2022.

Some staffers who left the agency have also questioned whether commission leadership has adequately prioritized housing complaints compared to other areas of the agency's remit, such as employment discrimination, based on the amount of damages and penalties the commission seeks.

Three former CCHR attorneys who spoke with Gothamist but did not want to be named out of fear of retaliation said Sapna Raj, the deputy commissioner of CCHR’s law enforcement bureau, reduced damages and civil penalties for housing-related cases during settlement negotiations more severely when compared to employment-discrimination cases.

“We were prosecuting [landlords] with thousands of units, and I would beg them to ask for higher civil penalties. We are supposed to be able to ask for upwards of $250,000. I was constantly told ‘No,’” said one former staffer. “But then we would settle cases against Prada and Gucci, where most New Yorkers cannot even afford to shop, for astronomically higher award amounts.”

Gross did not provide comment on the allegation or provide data on the percentage of damages and penalties awarded for housing claims compared to other discrimination categories.

Unfunded mandates

Even as CCHR’s staff has shrunk, the agency’s workload has increased in large part because the City Council has continued to expand the city’s human rights law. Since 2022, the Council added protections to guarantee salary transparency, expand the definition of domestic violence and ban discrimination by height or weight.

Source-of-income discrimination became illegal in 2008 under the city’s human rights law, and in 2020, the City Council added more types of income that qualified for protections and removed some exceptions to the law.

But each time, the Council’s finance division estimated the change would cost nothing, or that CCHR “would utilize existing resources to fulfill its requirements,” according to budget documents accompanying each piece of legislation.

“We had this charge that we just couldn't possibly fulfill to the extent given,” said Rudolph, the former director of CCHR’s source-of-income discrimination unit.

In May, the Council passed a series of bills to expand eligibility for the CityFHEPS housing voucher program. Adams vetoed the legislation last month, even though the bills passed the council with a veto-proof majority. If the councilmembers succeed, the expansion could shepherd thousands of more New Yorkers into a housing voucher program that CCHR is often called on to enforce.

In a written statement, City Council spokesperson Rendy Desamours said the Council “has taken strides” to change the law to reflect how New Yorkers face discrimination.

“It is the responsibility of the administration to hire and staff its agencies which the Council has fought for in this area and others throughout the year and during the budget process,” he said.

The mayor’s press office did not return a request for comment.

Transformative work

Fair housing proponents argue that, when the agency functions well, the ability of its law enforcement bureau to help voucher holders and other tenants can be transformative.

Former staffers said the commission’s process is one of the few legal proceedings in the city that’s designed for people to navigate without the help of an outside lawyer.

“The law enforcement bureau process is fairly radical,” said one former attorney. “You just tell us in your words what happened, and we will do the work from start to finish of trying to figure out if this violated the law, and if it did, of fixing that.”

The commission’s “pre-complaint interventions” are aimed at clearing up discrimination allegations quickly, without litigation. In addition to contacting brokers and landlords to inform them of the law, agency staff also conduct blind tests – responding to the same listings that voucher holders claim they were prevented from viewing, for example, to see if the staff member receives a different response by not mentioning a housing voucher. CCHR can require brokers and landlords to show apartments and set aside apartments specifically for voucher holders.

Newton said she was once again the victim of source-of-income discrimination last fall. A leasing agent at a property management firm in the Bronx told her the apartment she’d applied for was no longer available after learning Newton would be paying her rent with a housing voucher, Newton said.

Newton took her complaint to the housing non-profit Unlock NYC, where she now works as an intern, which then passed her allegation to the human rights commission. Records show a staffer with the source-of-income unit intervened.

In an email sent to the Bronx property management firm, a staff member with the agency instructed the company to allow Newton to apply for an apartment or work “with her to attain permanent housing.” Failure to acknowledge CCHR’s email, the staffer added, could expose the firm to civil penalties, emotional damages, attorney’s fees and years of agency oversight.

After the email was sent, Newton said the management company promptly gave her a viewing. She eventually signed a lease for a two-bedroom apartment in the development, and moved out of a shelter in January 2023. Gothamist is not naming the firm because Newton fears her landlord might retaliate against her for speaking publicly about the incident, including a possible threat of eviction.

She credited the commission for helping her secure a home, but said she’s just one of thousands of New Yorkers who need the agency’s help.

“They’re trying, they’re trying, but how can one person deal with thousands of cases every day? That’s just impossible,” Newton said. “Without the right funds, the right staffing and the right support from the city, CCHR would never be able to do anything.”