Among the report’s most damning findings is that it takes over a year, on average, to fill a building’s lottery units after construction has wrapped.
A report by the Citizens Housing & Planning Council found that buildings’ low-rent apartments often sit vacant for months while market-rate tenants move in, a gut punch for advocates working to house homeless New Yorkers and those with severe rent burdens. “We have spent years improving our ability to bring new units online, expanding our supply of affordable housing,” said CHPC executive director Jessica Katz in a statement. “But if we can’t move vulnerable New Yorkers into them, something is wrong.”
Among the report’s most damning findings is that it takes over a year, on average, to fill a building’s lottery units after construction has wrapped.
One in three housing lotteries did not kick off until months after a building was ready for occupancy, the report found. And on average, residents who applied for a lottery while a project was under construction waited a year and three months for all the building’s units to be filled. One project in Downtown Brooklyn filled its last affordable unit more than five years after it received its certificate of occupancy, according to the report. CHPC examined data on 21,382 apartments across 426 projects advertised on NYC Housing Connect between 2014 and 2018, corroborating the data with the property management companies overseeing a sample of the projects.
The organization said that because the Department of Housing Preservation and Development only provided data on the rent-up timelines of buildings — from the lottery date and certificate of occupancy to the date the last affordable unit was filled — it was not able to determine how long it took to lease individual apartments or how quickly the majority of units were leased.
