The second time, in early 2019, she ended up on a waitlist, but never heard back.But the future of that system is under stress — and competition for affordable housing could get even fiercer, thanks to budget woes brought on by the coronavirus pandemic.The application data between 2014 and 2019 reflects that.
Even when she is working, however, her income almost always falls below the minimum — as is spelled out in each rejection letter she gets from the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.Rafael Cestero, former HPD commissioner under Mayor Bloomberg and now president and CEO of the Community Preservation Corporation, said the budget cuts combined with construction shutdowns have stopped as many as 10 development deals his group had been working on.The Astoria residents had applied to a handful of affordable lotteries and got a match for one in 2017.“Building in high-income communities is an absolute no-brainer, not just from a moral perspective, but also an economic one,” Carr said.Needy New Yorkers try and fail for years to find affordable housing through a system overwhelmed by demand.The reason it is so difficult for poor New Yorkers to win a spot in the lottery is also why much of New York’s affordable housing gets built at all.But the minimum income for applicants there, she found out in her rejection letter, was $49,770.Said Fennell, “We need to be giving people in communities the power to control what happens in their neighborhoods, and to have ownership over that.”At Reside New York — a company hired by developers to screen, conduct interviews and tour apartments with lottery applicants — staff see the trend clearly: higher-priced “affordable” apartments spur the least demand.To Aaron Carr, executive director of Housing Rights Initiative, the current moment is an opportunity to move beyond what he described as the “failed system” of the housing lottery.That was due to what Margy Brown, the HPD associate commissioner who oversees the lottery, calls “the reply-all phenomenon” — where apartment hunters would “go through and just click apply, apply, apply to every lottery,” even if they didn’t fit the criteria.“People apply for years and to hundreds of apartments before they even get a call back,” she said.
“I’ve been moving every six months, or moving every year, that I’ve been living here.”The “community preference” that allots half of affordable apartments to locals makes getting a place harder for many.Grier has often seen higher-income prospective tenants go through the process of applying and being approved to rent the apartment — only to turn it down.For the 2019 lottery for apartments in a new luxury building in Greenpoint, Reside received 63,235 applicants in a randomized list from HPD, staff told THE CITY. Overall, the majority of applications in that time period were rejected. “It should be a right.”“Anything that we were going to close between, say, March 1 through the end of June isn’t happening,” he said.
She has lost clients, and her lease in Bed-Stuy is up at the end of the month. Only 37% of the total were eligible based on family size and income — 6,714,209 of 18,298,168.The trend pops up most at the highest end of the Housing New York income scale, 130% of the New York City area median income of $102,400 — or $133,120 for a family of three. For them, 650 applications came in for every available apartment from people who qualified based on household size and income.To land the apartment, she gathered together “an excessive amount of paperwork” to show she was eligible for the unit, available for people making between $34,355 and $43,860 a year.“We can’t build our way out of that crisis for the lowest income people,” Cestero said. A new East Village housing lottery is offering 30 brand-new apartments to qualified applicants, with rents starting at $674 for a studio apartment and rising to $2,991 for a 2-bedroom.. New Yorkers who earn 40%, 60%, and 130% of the annual median income — or between between $25,063 and $149,890 per year — may qualify for the apartments. NYC HPD LOTTERY. Osaren heard from a lottery administrator that money she had received through a GoFundMe campaign to help pay for her professional education put her over the apartment’s income limit — by $700.The lower the rent — and the lower the income of the household applying — the more people applied per apartment.“People at that level have more choice,” said Bernell Grier, executive director at IMPACCT Brooklyn, a 56-year-old community development nonprofit that builds affordable housing and runs lotteries.“At the end of the day, housing shouldn’t be a lottery,” he said.