The city’s lottery system for affordable apartments is called Housing Connect, but it too often fails to match New Yorkers with homes and, to his credit, Mayor Mamdani is setting out to fix it. We hope he succeeds with his plan, cleverly known as Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED).
This housing push doesn’t have to do with the construction of new housing as much as getting tenants in the door, which might seem like an odd issue to have in a city with as acute of a housing demand as New York.
But it is a problem and we routinely have hundreds of apartments that New Yorkers desperately want sit empty for half a year and more due to procedural and documentary obstacles. Mamdani intends to cut the median time for approvals from 210 to to 100 days via a mix of simplifying income verification, speeding up the process for lottery winners to be selected, and streamlining the applications, among other things.
This move is a recognition of a basic reality, which is that affordable housing is only as good as the ability to fill it. We talk much in these columns about the creation and preservation of housing at all income bands, but all that housing is useless if no one lives in it (another point in favor of the mayor and governor’s separate pied-à-terre tax that will hit often-empty living spaces). The delays in filling housing through the city’s lottery have knock-on effects beyond the apartments not going quickly to the people who need them.
As former Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen wrote in these pages, these delays mean that developers are being asked to open affordable or mixed-income buildings with the expectation that they will not begin receiving rental revenues for months and months after homes are completed. That can make it difficult to keep up with interest payments and maintenance costs or even discourage developers from creating affordable housing in the first place.
It’s certainly not that there’s any lack of interest; in fact, there tend to be thousands of applicants for every designated affordable unit made available through the lottery. Some of these applications might be frivolous or incomplete, but multiple reports have found that even potentially eligible New Yorkers who are making good-faith efforts to put themselves in the running — some with the assistance of case managers — are washing out of the application process after running into one of the many procedural hurdles. Others might be ineligible but not realize it until several steps into the process, which wastes both their time and the city’s
All of this also saps public confidence in the system. Regular New Yorkers don’t care about the reasons for the bureaucratic hurdles. All they hear is that buildings have gone up with hundreds of affordable units that are sitting empty six months after the ribbon was cut, and assume that there is some corruption or malfeasance keeping the rental market in the dumps. Some portion of eligible people are probably discouraged from applying at all, believing the lottery system to be rigged or pointless.
The changes that the mayor is seeking will still set this housing apart for those who need it most, but not let bureaucracy itself drive them away. They’re a long time coming, and we’re pleased that Mamdani is taking up the mantle, hoping to be remembered not only for building housing but filling it.