A Voucher Should Mean a Home: How Robin Hood and Anthos|Home are Closing the Gap | This Robin Hood Moment

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For people experiencing homelessness in New York City, getting a housing voucher like CityFHEPS should be the golden ticket to securing a permanent home. But often, that ticket leads to a dead end. The demand for affordable housing far outpaces supply, and even when apartments are available, families face overwhelming barriers—complex requirements, complicated processes, and landlords reluctant to accept vouchers.

Enter Anthos|Home, a Robin Hood nonprofit community partner who is disrupting the status quo. In just two years, they’ve helped nearly 500 households get on the express track to move into a permanent home—and they’re just getting started. Anthos|Home isn’t waiting for systemic change; they’re making change happen. By partnering with landlords, streamlining the voucher process, and providing ongoing support to both tenants and property owners, they’re proving that housing vouchers can—and should—work.

In this episode, hosts Kevin Thompson and Crystal Cooper sit down with Laura Lazarus, CEO and Co-Founder of Anthos|Home, to unpack how her team is cutting through red tape, tackling the housing crisis head-on, and reshaping what’s possible for families with vouchers.

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at info@robinhood.org.

“This Robin Hood Moment” is hosted by Kevin Thompson and Crystal Cooper. The show is produced and edited by Cory Winter, with graphic design by Mary Power. Additional motion graphics and footage are provided by Motion Array. Our theme music is from Epidemic Sound.

The views and opinions expressed by external podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Robin Hood or its personnel, nor does Robin Hood advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.

TRANSCRIPT

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Kevin Thompson: From Robin Hood—New York City’s largest poverty-fighting philanthropy—I’m Kevin Thompson. Welcome to “This Robin Hood Moment.”

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Kevin Thompson: Getting a housing voucher in New York City should feel like winning the lottery. It’s supposed to be your golden ticket—an express track out of the shelter system, housing insecurity, and the stress of not knowing where you’ll sleep next.

But for too many New Yorkers, that ticket comes with strings attached, knots of bureaucracy, and roadblocks that leave families stranded.

The reality is… having a voucher doesn’t guarantee a home. In fact, it often means entering a maze—complicated eligibility requirements, landlords who won’t accept vouchers, endless paperwork, and long waits with no clear end in sight.

But what if it didn’t have to be that way? What if having a voucher actually meant having the keys to your new home?

That’s where Anthos|Home comes in. In just two years, they’ve helped nearly 500 people who were once caught in that maze—find permanent housing.

They’re not waiting for the system to fix itself; they’re cutting through the red tape, building relationships with landlords, and making sure that when someone has a voucher in hand, it leads to a key in the door.

Today, my co-host, Crystal Cooper, and I, are talking with Laura Lazarus, CEO and Co-Founder of Anthos|Home, about how they’re doing it—and why their work matters now more than ever.

Because at Robin Hood, we don’t wait for perfect policies to fall into place. We find partners like Anthos|Home who are getting it done today, and we stand by them to make sure more New Yorkers have the stability, dignity, and opportunity that comes with having a place to call home.

But before we dive in, if you want to email me with guest suggestions or thoughts on this episode, you can reach us at info@robinhood.org.

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Kevin Thompson: You know, Crystal, when people hear the words “housing voucher,” they’re probably thinking that means someone’s got a guaranteed path to a home. But in New York City, it’s not that simple is it?

Crystal Cooper: Not even close. Having a voucher doesn’t mean you have a home—it means you’ve got a ticket to a game where the rules are confusing, the odds are stacked against you, and 99 out of 100 doors are locked to you.

Kevin Thompson: Exactly. The system is a tangled web: you’ve got federal Section 8 vouchers, city-administered CityFHEPS vouchers, you have these emergency assistance programs—it’s an alphabet soup of support. But navigating it? That’s where things fall apart.

Crystal Cooper: And even if you do manage to navigate it, you’re still facing an incredibly tight housing market. NYC’s vacancy rate is almost non-existent, and, as a voucher holder, with what little rental options you do have, you still have to factor in landlords who are hesitant to accept vouchers at all.

Kevin Thompson: So what’s the result? People with vouchers—who’ve done everything right—end up waiting months, sometimes years, just to find an apartment. It’s like giving someone a lifeboat… but not cutting the rope that keeps it tethered to a sinking ship.

Crystal Cooper: But here’s where it gets interesting. While the system is broken in so many ways, there are organizations out there cutting through the red tape and flipping the script on housing vouchers. Anthos|Home is one of them. They’re not waiting around for policy changes or perfect conditions—they’re getting people housed right now.

Kevin Thompson: And it’s not just a few people. They’re on the verge of placing their 500th person in a permanent home. That’s more than 500 individuals and families who aren’t just holding a voucher—they’re holding a key to their own front door.

Crystal Cooper: So today, we’re talking to the person leading that charge: Laura Lazarus, Co-Founder and CEO of Anthos|Home. She’s going to break down how they’re making this happen, what they’ve learned, and what it’ll take to meet the overwhelming demand for affordable housing in New York City.

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Crystal Cooper: Laura, we’re so excited to have you on the show!

Laura Lazarus: Thank you so much for having me.

Kevin Thompson: So, let’s start with the basics, Laura—what is Anthos|Home, and how do you fit into this housing voucher ecosystem, as it were? What problems were you trying to solve when you founded the organization?

Laura Lazarus: So, Anthos home was really trying to solve the problem that you articulated earlier. Which is? There are these incredible resources. A housing voucher which allows for a low income family to afford a reasonable rent here in New York City. And it is a proven solution. It has worked for decades, since the 1970s, and it is a mechanism by which somebody can leave homelessness forever.

But as you noted, it is incredibly difficult to use these vouchers. 40% of vouchers go unused here in New York. And for those who do use them, it takes them a long time. People are in shelter for, on average, at least a year, if not longer, because of the difficulties in finding a landlord willing to accept that voucher.

Think of us as a matchmaking service. We work with landlords to identify units that can be used with a voucher, and we then take the families who are in need of housing and match them to those landlords, and then we help them go through the process together. We really provide support for both landlords and tenants through that entire process, all the way to move in. And then for a year after to make sure that it’s a successful, permanent move.

Kevin Thompson: Wow that’s a very novel approach! But, personally, what drove you to get involved in this work, I’m interested in hearing that as well.

Laura Lazarus: So, I have spent my entire career in the world of affordable housing. I am an attorney, and I represented nonprofits going through housing development. I also worked for an affordable housing developer nationally, where I focused on large scale community reinvestment, both by preserving existing housing and building new housing. I’ve also worked for New York City’s housing department to help them, and I understand all of the creative solutions that New York City brings to bear.

And then I’ve worked for several nonprofits also focused on housing. So I really understand the housing issues from all angles. And this particular challenge is something that came about from my co-founder. We had worked together previously, and she had been at Covenant House New York. They ran, shelters for transitioned age youth. They were given 100 vouchers right after the pandemic, but those youth could not use those vouchers.

They had no idea how to do it. Whenever they would find a landlord and told them they had a voucher, there was no way the landlord wanted to work with them. And frankly, her staff at Covenant House actually didn’t understand the process because it is so complex and there’s a lot of need to help somebody who doesn’t know how to use a voucher, how to actually make that happen.

So, she and I continued to talk about brainstorming about this problem and was this unique to Covenant House? And it’s not. In fact, it’s very common for many nonprofit providers to have challenges helping their clients find permanent housing. And this is not just a New York City problem. This is a national problem. In 2022, the federally issued vouchers called Section 8, 40% of those went unused based on a study by the Furman Center, because people are not able to find landlords willing to rent to them.

So, we decided to look with the help of Robin Hood, who helped us with an initial planning grant. We started to talk to people around the country to see what other interesting models were out there. And we landed on an organization in California called Brilliant Corners, and they have a fantastic model that we think can really work here and elsewhere.

Crystal Cooper: Laura, I’m so glad that you brought us here to this point, and also, you’re talking about, post-pandemic, the idea sparking for Anthos|Home. This is incredible progress in just a few short years. You’ve already helped place nearly 500 people into affordable housing. What is the secret to the success of this model and how does it break through where others get stuck?

Laura Lazarus: So the aspects of the model that we think are so essential is a few things. One, we create relationships with landlords, brokers, property owners throughout New York City. We work in all five boroughs, and we provide those landlords a lot of support, but we reserve units so that they are available for the tenants that we are working with.

We have an expert team of people who work with the landlords and brokers. We have a separate operations team that really focuses on the vouchers itself, so that we understand the complexity here in New York, there are at least ten different kinds of vouchers. Each one has its own rules, its own maze.

Kevin Thompson: Ten different kinds?

Laura Lazarus: At least ten. In addition, the other key component of what we do is that we have a flexible funding pool, which is made up of investments from organizations like Robin Hood, which is critical, but also government partners. And that flexible funding is what we use to make sure a move can happen and that somebody can stay there. And we use those funds for a number of different things, including repairs for units that need them.

Most vouchers require an inspection and often units fail those inspections. I would say 95% of the units we look at have issues, not big issues. They can be things like an outlet is not the right kind of outlet. It can be window guards missing smoke detectors.

Crystal Cooper: And that’s enough to keep you out of a home?

Laura Lazarus: Oh yeah! Because a landlord may not want to deal with it, because they could go rent to somebody in the marketplace who’s not going to. I’m not saying that they shouldn’t have those things improve. Right. But that’s another small little barrier. And for a small amount of money, either we do it or the landlord does it. So we use the flexible funds on the front end. We also use them for moving costs, getting things out of storage, helping make sure that everyone has a bed and a mattress and a frame and kind of the essentials.

And then the last element of the model, which is to us also very critical, and this again comes from Brilliant Corners, is that we provide one year of services after someone has moved in to both the landlord and the tenant. So we are supporting the landlord if there are issues with the tenant, so they don’t have to become a social worker.

But we are also there to look after the tenant. If there are repairs needed, we will step in and talk to the landlord about addressing that issue. We also use that Flexible Funding Pool to help with any missed or delayed government payments, which do happen, and they’re very difficult to resolve. It’s not that, you know, the government is incredibly well intentioned in New York, is incredibly lucky, frankly, because of the amount of resources that are here in the form of housing vouchers.

But resolving a miss payment can be really difficult to do. For example, we were working with a nonprofit provider and that nonprofit providers, submitted the application with the landlord’s maiden name. So the city issued the checks in the landlords maiden name. The landlord could not cash the checks. The landlord needed those checks in order to move the tenant in. She was about to become homeless. She was, it was right before Thanksgiving. So we paid the landlord while we sorted out getting the name redone. That’s not something the government can do, and that’s something that flexibility is really helpful for, and having access to those funds to kind of make those decisions is not, it’s like, does this make sense? Can we do it? It’s a mistake. Of course, it’s not a big mistake, but it was going to affect somebody’s, you know, ability to not have to enter shelter.

Kevin Thompson: So Laura, the New York State Comptroller’s Office published an audit back in October 2024, stating that it took people an average almost a year to find an apartment and secure a CityFHEPS voucher. What’s driving these long wait times?

Laura Lazarus: So for a family or individual to qualify for a CityFHEPS voucher, typically they need to be in shelter and they need to be income eligible and they need to be a US resident. So one challenge for somebody who receives a voucher is it’s very difficult to find a landlord who will accept that voucher. And so they can go to multiple property providers and knock on the door. And once they tell them they have a voucher, they will not hear back. So it can take months to find a landlord who is willing to work with them.

Whereas with our model, we have already talked to these landlords, we’ve explained the process and we have given them this help. Once you find that landlord willing to take the voucher, the unit has to meet the inspection standards.

As I mentioned, the repairs may be an issue and so the unit may not pass inspection. Then the landlord has to be willing to make those repairs. Not all landlords are willing to do those repairs, even if they are low cost item, because they don’t need to. There’s a very low vacancy rate in New York, 1.4%. There are a lot of people out there looking for housing.

So let’s assume they agreed to do those repairs. Then the unit has to be inspected again. And once everybody is agreed that we can move forward, there’s a lot of paperwork involved. So the landlord has a bunch of paperwork they have to prepare. The tenant has a lot of paperwork to prepare. Sometimes there can be mishaps and putting that together each voucher is very particular. So if you miss something you might have to have that push back. Or if for some reason your package as it gets reviewed gets delayed, then you may have to get something redone. For example, pay stubs have to be current within 30 days, but if for some reason your package is delayed, you may have to go back and find those pay stubs. And if you’re an hourly wage worker, that may be difficult because you have to go back to your employer. You might not be on the internet, they may not have the pay stubs on the internet. You may have to wait for your two weeks up to get the next set of pay stubs.

It can become a really difficult cycle. And what we really try to do is we have this expert team that really guides tenants and landlords through the paperwork to help them understand, because we can focus on all of the minute rules and put together the perfect package.

Kevin Thompson: So you’re more like the ombudsman for both the tenant and the land.

Laura Lazarus: Yes, we’re definitely looking out for them. We’re reviewing their documents, and we’re also hoping that that really reduces the workload on the government because we want to support them, because it’s it can be difficult if they have to keep reviewing things, since our goal is to put in front of them a perfect package.

Kevin Thompson: Laura, recently, City Limits had an article where they highlighted that there’s a high concentration of where these vouchers are used across the five boroughs. And in fact, it looks like that’s only two boroughs where, you know, they have a high prevalence. Can you maybe talk about what your experience with that has been?

Laura Lazarus: So, the city issued vouchers, which I do want to acknowledge is an incredible thing that New York has access to. And in fact, I just learned that New York City’s city-issued vouchers is the second largest rental subsidy program in the country, which is impressive that the city has put that up and that they’re doing like amazing work. But one challenge with the voucher is that they are limited in terms of the rent that the voucher will allow for. CityFHEPS have caps on what, a one bedroom, two bedroom, three bedroom. So for that reason, unfortunately you often find units in lower income neighborhoods.

Federal vouchers have something called an exception payment standard, and at least with HPD, I know that they will allow you to go to higher income neighborhoods. But it takes work. What we have found in our work, because of the support that we find, are providing with landlords, at the very beginning, we probably were not finding the best units in the best neighborhoods because we were really just trying to let people know who we are. And we were. We just started to work with landlords in the summer of 2023.

And it was a challenge because they didn’t believe us that we were going to be able to step in, that we make checks happen, that we would sort out their problems, you know, who were we right to them. But we have built that relationship. And by March of 2024, we had 170 units identified for our voucher holders.

Kevin Thompson: That’s amazing!

Laura Lazarus: What’s been really great is that as we continue to work with more landlords and partner with organizations like the Rent Stabilization Association of New York, the Small Property Owners of New York, REBNY, as well, the Real Estate Board of New York. All of those relationships, plus our track record to date, has opened up more doors for us. So, we are getting access to better quality units, better landlords in terms of responsiveness and better neighborhoods.

And also, I think that our support has been really critical to bringing in some smaller landlords who definitely would never have thought about this program. We had a young adult who’s age out of foster care. This is through our amazing partnership with the New York City Administration for Children’s Services.

She found a unit herself in Staten Island, which is where she wanted to live. This was one of two units that this landlord owned. This woman, the landlord lived in Florida most of the time. She had never heard of the voucher program. She didn’t understand that it was a form of guaranteed rent. So we got on the phone with her. We explained the program to her and once she understood it, she agreed she was not really on the internet, so we had to Fedex her documents, walk her through what she needed to sign, and the young adult. She was able to move in that summer, within a few months of identifying them.

Kevin Thompson: But that wouldn’t have happened without the approach that you all take at Anthos. I mean, I don’t know how anybody else would have made that happen.

Laura Lazarus: Right. I mean, I think that shelters and nonprofit providers, of course, are focused on helping people move out. But they don’t have the resources to spend the time, the ability and their singular focus is on a lot of things, whereas we can really focus on this one little problem.

Crystal Cooper: You mentioned that in your last story that it was an awesome CityFHEPS success story. There has been conversation in New York about expanding housing voucher programs beyond the city level to create more statewide support. How do you think a broader, more comprehensive voucher system could impact the work that you do, and the lives of the people who are struggling to find affordable housing, especially considering some of these restrictions that go along with the CityFHEPS voucher?

Laura Lazarus: Because I really believe that housing vouchers are this amazing tool to help somebody leave homelessness, leave kind of an unhoused situation, having more vouchers statewide would be fantastic. But we also know from talking to the state, we’ve talked to the Housing Community and Renewal Agency and others, advocates like State Senator Brian Kavanagh, that it’s really challenging to use these vouchers not just in New York, but in Buffalo, in Syracuse, in Rochester.

So having additional access to additional resources is critical. And then I think ideally, some amount of the kind of elements of our model, if they could be paired with that resource to help expand these vouchers, reach to help make sure that somebody in Buffalo can find a landlord who’s willing to rent to them, somebody helping them understand what the value of the voucher is, help them with the paperwork.

Hopefully, if there were a new voucher system, maybe there could be some streamlining of the requirements in some way, still making sure that people are income eligible. But you know, I think that some support with landlords is really important. I think that’s the thing we learned as we looked around the country for all the models that are out there; it’s really handholding with landlords, making them understand that this is a valuable program for them and that someone will be there to resolve issues that are difficult to resolve.

So going back to that Staten Island landlord that I mentioned about five months in, once the tenant had moved in, unfortunately, she didn’t receive one of her payments from the government. So we made that payment to her so she didn’t have to deal with the fact that she wasn’t getting much needed money to probably help her with her mortgage while we sorted out of the payment issue was. And then we were able to resolve it because we have relationships with our government partners to help fix that.

But sometimes it’s just it’s actually a landlord issue. So there was a young adult, she had been looking for housing for seven months. She was so motivated. She was so organized. She had just graduated from foster care and was looking for her first home, but she was having no luck with landlords.

We were able to connect her to a unit very quickly. She was actually the first young adult that we moved in, to housing, but once she got there, she figured out that her utility bills were incredibly high and she didn’t understand why. So we reached out to the landlord for her. And the landlord is like, I’m not going to do anything about this, this is not my problem. But it was obviously going to affect her. So we hired an electrician to go out there.

Crystal Cooper: Oh my goodness!

Laura Lazarus: And figure out… it wasn’t a big expense, okay! But the electrician determined that she was being charged for her neighbor’s electric bill.

Crystal Cooper and Kevin Thompson: How?!

Laura Lazarus: Then we could get the landlord to fix the problem, right? But a tenant would not be able to do this, right. She doesn’t have resources to go hire an electrician or even figure out with, you know, ConEd what’s going on. So then we paid her arrears because there was no way that we’re going to get the neighbor to pay that, you know, past arrears. She never ended up having arrears.

She is successfully in her apartment. She’s graduated from our program. She’s now beginning a family. She’s now thinking about going back to college. I mean, but she wouldn’t have been able to do that without just this little bit of help.

Kevin Thompson: Right!

Laura Lazarus: So the aftercare piece, it’s a wide variety of things that can happen to anybody who moves into a new apartment.

Kevin Thompson: And you avoided a cascading problem there. Right. Because had she not been able to pay her electric bill, not only had what should be without that service, which is a huge problem, but now she probably would be behind in her rent. And, you know, as a result of it and an into a whole spiral, which, you know, leads her back to where she started without being housed in some way. I mean, that’s amazing, that that’s an incredible story.

Crystal Cooper: It truly is. Laura, this conversation has stretched my brain in all of the best ways. You are a navigator, you’re a risk mitigator, as Kevin mentioned, Anthos|Home is an ombudsmen. I’m curious, you know, what’s next for Anthos|Home looking ahead? How do you scale this model to help even more New Yorkers—and, again, what needs to change within the broader system to make that possible?

Laura Lazarus: So we are really excited that we’ve built the infrastructure that we think can be expanded upon with more resources, with more partnerships. As I mentioned, we have a fantastic partnership with New York City Administration for Children’s Services. With that partnership, we help young adults who are aging out of foster care, who often have nowhere to go. And we also are helping families who are involved with the child welfare system, of which they’re more than 1,300, in shelter right now, and many of them qualify for, again, the city issued voucher, which is amazing, but helping them navigate out of that.

We also work with high health need households as one of our additional private funders. In addition to Robin Hood, the Helmsley Charitable Trust, who often have difficulty navigating finding permanent housing, these are people with 1 or 2 chronic health conditions. So we are looking to expand our work. We hope by next summer that we will have housed 500 households, a thousand people by next summer, and that we hope to continue to increase that year after year, and partnering again with the city in their efforts with AIP, with the Housing Preservation and Development Department, New York City Housing Authority, as well as Department of Social Services and their accompanying agencies.

Crystal Cooper: Laura, this has been incredibly inspiring, thank you for the work that you do and we’re just so grateful for the support that you’ve given some of the neediest New Yorkers. Thanks for being here.

Laura Lazarus: Thank you so much. Thank you so much to Robin Hood for all of the amazing support that you all have provided, our amazing team for kind of standing up for this organization and trying something new.

Crystal Cooper: What Anthos|Home is doing isn’t just impressive—it’s transformative. They’ve shown that when you cut through the bureaucracy, make smart bets, and focus on solutions, you can turn a housing voucher into what it’s meant to be: a home.

To our listeners, thank you for joining us on “This Robin Hood Moment.” If you found this conversation meaningful, share it with someone who needs to hear it. Because while the affordable housing crisis might feel overwhelming, stories like this remind us: change is possible—and it’s happening right now.

We’ll see you next time.

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Kevin Thompson: This episode of ‘This Robin Hood Moment’ was produced and edited by Cory Winter. Graphics by Mary Power. Our theme music is from Epidemic Sound. I’m Kevin Thompson—joined by the ever-insightful Crystal Cooper—for Robin Hood: New York City’s largest local poverty-fighting philanthropy. Thanks for listening.