Don't Assume Termination of Section 8 Payments Terminates Lease

Don't rely on the termination of Section 8 payments alone as sufficient grounds for terminating a resident's lease—particularly if the owner's actions were the reasons for the Section 8 termination. Make sure you have “good cause” before trying to evict any resident.

Consider what happened in a recent New York case. The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) sued to evict six Section 8 residents after their NYCHA subsidies were suspended and NYCHA terminated their housing assistance payments contracts. NYCHA claimed that the residents' leases therefore were terminated. The court combined the cases and ruled against NYCHA. The 1995 Williams Second Consent Judgment requires an owner to have good cause for terminating a Section 8 tenancy. The Section 8 payments were terminated because the units failed quality standards inspections and NYCHA failed to correct the conditions. Since NYCHA's actions ultimately were the cause of the terminations, it didn't have good cause to evict the residents [1212 Grand Concourse LLC v. Ynguil, January 2010].