Housing Connect Bills – City Council

Good morning Chair Sanchez and Council Members. My name is Howard Slatkin, and I am Executive Director of Citizens Housing and Planning Council. My testimony today will focus on the housing lottery process generally, and related to Intros 1264, 1265, and 1266.

CHPC is in the midst of research about the range of approaches to matching residents with affordable housing units in other global cities. We look forward to publishing the results of our research in the weeks to come, but for today’s hearing will share some key takeaways of relevance.

In defining what works as a fair and efficient system, every city strikes a different balance between speed and choice. It is vital to put people in homes quickly, as well as fairly. These goals relate in complex ways, and policy often strikes different balances in different circumstances, as cities adapt their processes to evolving needs and situations. In many cases, the cities we are studying have chosen to change their approach to allocations in order to address clearly articulated policy objectives.

Consistency and clarity are important to the allocation process. However, rigidity and proceduralism pose risks because of the range of individual circumstances the process needs to address, and the scale of New York Citys lottery system, with such a large number of New Yorkers in need of affordable housing and such a limited number of units available. CHPC’s most recent Brutal Bureaucracy report, based on data from 2014 through 2021, found that average lease-up time for new construction affordable housing took more than a year, with wide variation among projects.

These and other results, including the long delays in re-rentals recently documented by the NY Housing Conference, highlight the need for continuous monitoring and improvement of the allocation process, as well as the need for an agile and adaptable process for marketing as well as the development of tech platforms and other supporting tools. HPD’s recent revisions to its Marketing Handbook are a welcome step in making this process more timely and responsive; this active management approach must be continued.

A key lesson for todays hearing drawn from our research is that the details of lottery procedures should not be fixed in law. The agencies administering the process (HPD and others) need the ability to adapt the process to changing circumstances and an understanding of outcomes.

This is not to say “trust them, it will all work out fine.” There are huge challenges to conducting lotteries on the scale that NYC does. Efforts to optimize individual outcomes can easily create enormous logjams that hurt everyone waiting for affordable units, as well as affordable housing providers. In NYC’s multilayered process of allocating affordable units to qualifying residents, we must continue to grapple with the balance between speed and choice, based on sound data about how the process is working.

The Council is situated to improve the affordable housing allocation process not by legislating its details, but rather by using its oversight authority to ensure the clarity of goals for this process, the measurement of results, and that there is an ongoing practice of monitoring and improving upon this process.