“By using those higher-income units, you subsidize the lower-income ones,” said Katz, a former HPD official. Jessica Katz, executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, said this “cross-subsidy” is a building block of the city’s housing programs - and a feature, not a bug. To keep many privately built, publicly subsidized projects in the black and financially viable for the long term, developers collect rent from people of different income levels. 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. “You would have to work four to five jobs in order to afford an apartment.” Mixed Deck But at the end of the day … how can one afford an apartment if people are getting $15,000, $12,000 under the amount that they put?” she said. “You don’t want people to be lazy, fine, I get that. Before that, she set her hopes on a building in Upper Manhattan.īut the minimum income for applicants there, she found out in her rejection letter, was $49,770. It was for a building in Downtown Brooklyn where the minimum income was set at $105,326, an email from HPD said. Her latest rejection from HPD came just last week. The rest of the family sleeps in three beds set up in the single bedroom. In her current apartment - paid for in part by a rental voucher valid for up to five years - her eldest two kids switch off sleeping on a bed set up near the kitchen. 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.
#NYC HOUSING CONNECT UPCOMING LOTTERIES 2016 FULL#
Nearly 10,000 eligible applications came in for those units, or 1,107 applications per apartment.Ĭardona has worked in the past at Macy’s, but now takes care of her children full time, and volunteers on her local education council. THE CITY found that in five years, there were just nine apartments available for her income category and family size through the lottery. But you don’t see anything less than that, at all.” Grisel Cardona, who has been trying to get an affordable apartment through the housing lottery, plays with her 2-year-old son, Lord Mason, in their Mt. “The least that shows there is about $30,000 or $49,000, depending on where and what it is. Income minimums on lottery advertisements hardly ever match what she has. In 14 projects, most of them targeted to even higher income limits under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s housing program, buildings went through their entire list of eligible applicants for the highest-priced apartments and found no one to take their affordable units.Ĭardona said she gets by on about $18,000, from disability payments for her children - her eldest, 9, and youngest, 2, both have autism - and food stamps. They are six times more likely to have their number come up in a lottery as poor applicants - and many ultimately decide not to rent the apartment offered. For them, 650 applications came in for every available apartment from people who qualified based on household size and income.įor the apartments with the highest income limits - between $122,880 and $168,960 a year for a family of three in 2020 - the competition was the least, with 123 eligible applicants for every one apartment.
Of the five income categories within the lottery system, households like Cardona’s that are classified as “extremely low-income” - currently defined as earning up to $30,720 for a family of three - faced the most competition for apartments. “It’s frustrating,” said Grisel Cardona, a South Bronx mom of three who has applied to the lottery system more times than she can recall over the last decade. How an Edge for Neighborhood Residents Skews the Odds in NYC’s Housing Lotteries
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