Showing Some Rare Sympathy for the Landlord Glenn Lawrence, who lives in the Bronx, is worried about his rent, a portion of which the Advantage program had paid. On Thursday morning, Glenn Lawrence, a driver for Budget rental cars, walked from his apartment in the Castle Hill section of the Bronx to a nearby outpost of Catholic Charities to learn how he might avoid the pain and financial burden of relocating. Chiefly, he hoped not to relocate back into the shelter system in which he'd spent several degrading months. At the shelter where he had lived in Harlem, he was not allowed to bring in food, he told me. Mr. Lawrence currently works three days a week making $9.67 an hour, which puts him in the range of making $1,000 a month; the Budget job is one he held during the entire time he was homeless. He has been having a difficult time finding additional work to maintain a livable income. The rent on his apartment in a two-story house is $963 a month. Affluent New Yorkers can be heard on any given Sunday culling the real-estate Web sites, lamenting the difficulties of finding two-bedroom apartments in great neighborhoods for under $1 million. Whatever the lunacy of a market that in many parts of the city puts a buyer of a $900,000 home firmly in the middle class, there is a greater insidiousness to the real-estate realities in some of the most depressed quarters of New York. For what it costs Mr. Lawrence to live in a one bedroom in one of the poorest parts of the city, he could rent an apartment of comparable size in sunny Pasadena. Until this month, a portion of Mr. Lawrence's rent was paid for by the Advantage program, a controversial initiative devised to transition people out of homelessness. It offered subsidies for up to two years to help people in shelters afford their own apartments, provided they worked or took part in job training. The state cut financing for the program last year, and the city said it would discontinue it. The Legal Aid Society sued the city and, until this month, the Bloomberg administration was financing the subsidies. Then, on Tuesday, an appeals court ruled that the city was no longer required to make rental payments. On Thursday, Mr. Lawrence was attending one of the dozens of seminars the Department of Homeless Services is conducting, through its Homebase program, to try to minimize the damage resulting from Advantage's dissolution. Jaime Feinstein, the social worker leading the discussion, explained to tenants that in many cases, landlords, struggling financially themselves, were not the enemy; in many cases, she could negotiate with landlords to lower rents. Ms. Feinstein, who works for Catholic Charities, which is contracted to run Homebase in the South Bronx, makes it her business to ingratiate herself with landlords in the area. She calls them on their birthdays. Mr. Lawrence, in fact, had no ill will toward the man who owned the house where he has been a tenant, describing him in the meeting as "a beautiful person." His issue was with the broader universe of unaffordable housing, which in many cases forces property owners to charge high rents to help meet their burdensome mortgage payments on exorbitantly priced real estate. The crisis around Advantage, which threatens to displace thousands of once-homeless families, is at the same time jeopardizing the livelihoods of thousands of landlords, many of them small-property owners now put in a very precarious position. Having been told they would receive two years" worth of rent, they entered into good-faith relationships with the city, only now to be told they wouldn't get the money after all. Even the Legal Aid Society, not generally a friend of business, has been drawn to their woes, said Steven Banks, the organization's lead lawyer. So rarely a figure of sympathy in the lore of New York, the landlord has emerged as another victim of the Bloomberg administration's seemingly ad hoc approach to homeless policy. I offer by way of example Linda Sharp, who had relied on the income generated from a multiunit building she bought in Bushwick, Brooklyn, during the 1990s to support her in her old age. Two-thirds of Ms. Sharp's current tenants came to her through Advantage. One of them, James Walker, who served in the reserves during the Vietnam War, is disabled, having had four strokes. Ms. Sharp has picked him up from the hospital. When he moved in, after two years in a shelter in Queens, with only $300 to buy everything for his apartment, Ms. Sharp called the corporate offices of Sleepy's and persuaded the company to deliver a mattress at no cost the same day. Save for a bed, a sofa and a picture of the daughter Mr. Walker lost custody of years ago, when she was 6, the apartment is unfurnished. Ms. Sharp has already lowered the rent, to $750 a month, and has no plans to evict Mr. Walker. But at the same time, she is facing the possibility of foreclosure, and she has little interest in participating in Bushwick's gentrification. "People have told me I could rent to hipsters," she said. But you know, I don't really want to rent to hipsters. Not long after I met Ms. Sharp, I spoke with Ferdo Shkreli, an Albanian immigrant who owns a number of buildings in the Bronx. He has had to evict some of his Advantage tenants, but others remain. "You get very emotionally involved with some people," he said. He and his brother, for years, have together paid rent for one of the tenants, a veteran. "There's this myth in the air in New York that all landlords are millionaires," he said. We're not.