New Development in Brooklyn Offers Below-Market Apartments to Lucky Winners of Process That Is Functionally Indistinguishable From a Raffle
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — A new mixed-income residential development in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, has opened its affordable housing lottery for 12 below-market-rate units, receiving 87,454 applications in the first two weeks of the application window — a ratio of 7,288 applicants per apartment that the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development describes as “competitive” and that statisticians describe as “roughly the same odds as being struck by lightning in a year, but for housing.” Coverage from Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
The housing lottery system is the primary mechanism by which New York City attempts to distribute affordable housing among income-qualified residents. Developers who receive tax benefits, zoning variances, or other public subsidies are required to set aside a percentage of units — typically 20 to 25 percent — at below-market rents for households earning between 40 and 130 percent of Area Median Income. These units are then allocated through a lottery among qualified applicants. The lottery is random. The need is not random. The need is extremely concentrated and distributed across a much larger population than the lottery can serve.
The 87,000 and the 12
The 87,454 applicants for 12 units represent households that have qualified by income, have completed the multi-page application, have gathered the required documentation, and have entered a system that will select 12 of them for apartments that will be — in the Greenpoint market, where market-rate one-bedrooms run between $3,500 and $5,000 per month — charging between $1,200 and $2,100 depending on unit size and household income. The difference between winning and not winning this lottery is approximately $20,000 to $35,000 per year in housing costs. This is why 87,454 people applied.
The Process
The lottery randomly selects applicants in order of preference — certain groups have preferences, including mobility-impaired applicants, community board residents, municipal employees, and veterans — and then proceeds down the list until all units are filled. The 87,442 households that are not selected will remain in their current housing situations, on their waiting lists, in their doubled-up apartments, in their rent-stabilized units if they have them, or in the process of applying to the next lottery, which will also be oversubscribed by a ratio that makes the word “lottery” feel quite literal.
The NYC HPD runs the lottery system with genuine care and transparency. The system is fair within its parameters. The parameters — 12 units for 87,454 qualified applicants — are not an administrative problem. They are a supply problem. The number of income-qualified households seeking affordable housing in New York City is enormously larger than the number of income-qualified units available. The lottery allocates what exists. It does not create what is needed.
The Mamdani Housing Agenda
Mayor Mamdani campaigned on accelerating affordable housing construction, reforming the lottery system, and freezing rents for stabilized tenants. The rent freeze addresses the one million households in stabilized apartments. The lottery system addresses the much smaller pool of newly created affordable units. Neither addresses the approximately 600,000 housing cost-burdened households in New York City who are neither in stabilized housing nor in the lottery queue. The mayor is aware of all of this. The housing crisis is large. The tools are smaller than the crisis. This is true of every NYC mayor who has addressed housing since at least 1980, and Mamdani enters office with clearer eyes about this dynamic than most.
The Winners
Twelve households will receive life-changing news. Their housing costs will drop by amounts that, depending on their circumstances, may change what is possible for them: whether a parent can stop working a second job, whether a child can attend after-school programs, whether a medical bill can be paid without crisis. The housing lottery at this scale is not a housing policy. It is a welfare lottery. Both things are true, and the twelve winners deserve to know both.
More housing satire: NewsThump.
Building More Affordable Housing
The long-term solution to a housing lottery that receives 87,000 applications for 12 units is, straightforwardly, building more affordable units. New York City has a target of 500,000 new homes over the next decade through the City of Yes for Housing Opportunity zoning reform. The reform allows more housing in more neighborhoods, including in areas historically resistant to multifamily development, and has been projected to produce significant new supply over time. Whether supply translates into affordability — whether new units at various price points reduce the overall pressure on low- and moderate-income renters — is a subject of genuine economic debate. The affordable housing advocates who run the lottery are cautiously optimistic. The developers building market-rate units are enthusiastic. The 87,442 households that did not win this round are waiting to see what the data shows.
The affordable housing lottery exists within a broader system of below-market housing preservation and production that New York City has developed over decades, including rent stabilization, the Mitchell-Lama program, Section 8 vouchers, and various city-sponsored affordable development programs. Each program serves a different income band and tenure type. Together they cover a substantial portion of the city’s population. None of them, individually or together, covers the full range of New York City residents who spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing, which is the standard definition of housing cost burden. The lottery is the visible, individually consequential tip of a system that has genuine reach and genuine gaps simultaneously. The 12 units matter to 12 households. The 87,442 households are not invisible to the system; they are just in the queue.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/