NEW YORK — The Adams administration is launching a new initiative that aims to use city vouchers for homeless New Yorkers to create subsidized housing in market-rate buildings.

Under the program first reported by POLITICO, nonprofits contracting with the city can lease buildings from private landlords for up to nine years, before renting those apartments to CityFHEPS voucher holders.

The city is also working with nonprofits to acquire the buildings, with 30-plus-year contracts to provide voucher payments to those properties.

“What’s really unique here is that this is the city committing social service dollars to affordable housing supply issues,” Social Services Commissioner Molly Wasow Park said in an interview.

An agency spokesperson did not disclose the projected cost of the program.

Mayor Eric Adams will additionally issue an emergency declaration on Thursday to expedite contracting with the nonprofits, allowing providers to more swiftly lease buildings and move voucher holders into them. Officials said that move would fast-track 1,000 subsidized units.

The effort seeks to create a faster path out of homeless shelters for more than 10,000 households who have the CityFHEPS vouchers but have been unable to find apartments on the open market, given the city’s severe housing shortage.

The announcement also comes amid an escalating fight between Adams and the City Council over the program. The lawmaking body approved a resolution on Thursday to authorize the body to sue the administration for not implementing reforms to expand access to the vouchers. The Council overrode the mayor’s veto on the measure in July.

“There has been no final decision yet on any legal action, but this maintains our ability to keep our options open,” Speaker Adrienne Adams told reporters ahead of the Council meeting.

The administration has argued the mandated changes would be too costly, and that the main problem with CityFHEPS is that there are too few places to use the vouchers.

“It’s not a lack of vouchers that’s the problem, it’s a lack of housing,” Wasow Park said. ”We are trying to take concrete steps to address what we think is the root of the problem, which is housing supply.”

The Department of Social Services has used this mechanism in the past but is now memorializing it through a structured, formalized program.

For the program to work, nonprofits partnered with the city would have to find landlords with habitable, mostly empty buildings who are willing to turn over their properties.

Asked why a landlord would participate, Park said the guarantee of rent payments through CityFHEPS would be a significant draw. “Leasing up is a time consuming process, there’s risk associated with it, there’s lots of dollars associated with it, and having a not-for-profit intermediary insulates them from some of those challenges,” Wasow Park said.

In addition to the 1,000 units that would be in leased buildings, officials estimate some 500 subsidized units would be created through acquisition.

That process would involve nonprofits getting a 30-plus-year commitment from the city for CityFHEPS voucher payments, along with funding for maintenance and operations, and light touch social services.

With that contract behind them, the no-profit would then be able to borrow the money needed to acquire the building,and use the CityFHEPS rental stream to pay down their mortgage.