WHAT HEELS: Cheap Stunt For Cheap Rent
Six NYC women were arrested on charges that include criminal possession of a forged instrument and offering a false instrument for filing, after allegedly submitting forged police reports, court orders and other documents to masquerade as domestic violence victims so they could jump to the front of the waiting list for federally subsidized apartments, reports The New York Times:
As of Sept. 22, there were 127,764 families on the New York City Housing Authority’s waiting list for Section 8 vouchers, said Howard Marder, a spokesman for the agency.
The voucher program can be worth thousands of dollars a year; tenants who qualify for the subsidy must pay 30 percent of their adjusted gross income toward the rent, while the remainder is taken care of with federal money passed through the authority to a landlord.
The city Housing Authority is accepting Section 8 applications from only three groups of people: victims of domestic violence; those referred by prosecutors who are deemed intimidated witnesses in criminal cases; and certain people referred by the city’s Administration for Children’s Services.
Rose Gill Hearn tells The Times that she’s seen hundreds of housing fraud cases since she became commissioner of the city’s Department of Investigation in 2002, but never a scheme like this.
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