Congratulations, you won the New York City housing lottery! But not so fast: Before you can move into an affordable apartment, you have to provide a mountain of paperwork to verify you’re eligible.
But now, that mountain may look less like the Rockies and more like the Catskills, as the city Department of Housing Preservation and Development is requiring applicants to provide fewer documents.
The changes aim to make it easier and quicker for income-restricted, subsidized apartments to be rented and sold — both for the applicants and the landlords.
Applicants with jobs must submit only a single month of pay stubs rather than as many as six in the previous process. Now, only applicants who are self-employed need to provide tax returns.
Previously, applicants who had under $5,000 in assets were able to self-certify rather than provide bank statements, but now that ability is expanded for those who own under $51,600 in assets. Plus, those self-certifications — also called affidavits — no longer require a notary’s signature.
Applicants receiving federal benefits, including through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) or Social Security, won’t need as many documents either. The income determination they get as part of benefits will be enough, allowing them to skip submitting the same information through pay stubs and the like.
Those who have disabilities have more options to verify their eligibility using drivers licenses and school records, specifically when applying for units set aside for people with hearing, vision or mobility disabilities. Before, those applicants had to request that a medical professional complete a form attesting to their disability.
Sam Rosenberg, executive director of Reside New York — a Brooklyn-based company developers hire to screen, conduct interviews and tour apartments with lottery applicants — says he’s often seen applicants lose out on affordable apartments because they weren’t able to gather the required documents.
“When the city makes it easier for the applicant to apply, easier for an applicant to get approved for an apartment, this will definitely speed up the process, and actually hand out affordable units for those in need,” he said. “All parties involved will have a more efficient process.”
New residential developments sit on the border of Downtown Brooklyn and Fort Greene, June 11, 2024. Credit: Ben Fractenberg/THE CITY
Meanwhile, HPD will suspend rules for a year starting May 1 to allow vacant affordable apartments to be rented or sold on a first-come, first-served basis rather than be subject to the city’s lottery system, known as Housing Connect. The point of those changes is to get tenants into housing faster while the agency upgrades the platform for the lottery system. In 2024, more than 10,000 households moved into affordable apartments.
Apartments on Housing Connect are mostly subsidized units that have below-market-rate rents and are reserved for tenants that earn income within a certain range.
“City agencies are trying to eliminate barriers to housing and that’s huge,” said Emily Kurtz, chief housing officer at affordable housing provider RiseBoro Community Partnership. “As an industry, we’ve been having conversations about how much work is required for someone applying for housing, but also how the paperwork requirement becomes even more burdensome the longer the placement takes.”
Paper Cut
Ceronne Mitchell, who won a $1,631-per-month one-bedroom apartment in Jamaica, Queens through the affordable lottery, would’ve appreciated the simplified paperwork requirements back in 2023 when she had to get approved.
“I definitely would have loved to do less paperwork,” she said. “That would’ve helped me, not having to pull so many pay stubs.”
While applying to lottery apartments was “as easy as swiping on a dating app,” she said, things got more complicated when she heard that her lottery application was selected.
Mitchell, now 26, had to provide six pay stubs, six tax forms and statements from her retirement and bank accounts, among many other records. At the time, she had two jobs — one in social media management and a side gig working retail.
“It wasn’t necessarily difficult, but it was tedious because I was relying on other people to get me documents on time,” Mitchell said. “There was a whole process of having all this money be confirmed. They really are combing through your finances. I didn’t realize how invasive it was.”
She went back and forth with the leasing agent, who asked her questions about the joint bank account she shared with her mom and Apply Pay statements that showed her mom sometimes sending her money. She was jittery, knowing that if she was approved for the new apartment, she’d have to quit her second job because the commute would be too far — and she’d have to break her current lease.
More than a month later, Mitchell signed her affordable lease and soon moved into the apartment with her dog Lacey and set about furnishing her space with secondhand items to create what she described as a “Parisian, Old World aesthetic.”
“I would go through that tenfold,” she said — but offered a word of advice for future housing lottery winners: “By the time they email you, be ready.”
Social service providers say the cuts to required paperwork will especially lift the burden on formerly homeless New Yorkers as well as those that fled domestic violence, a leading driver of family homelessness in the city.
More than 95% of domestic violence survivors experience financial abuse, such as the abuser ruining their credit score, controlling bank accounts or taking out large loans under their name, according to Gabriela Sandoval Requena, director of policy and communications at New Destiny Housing, which helps survivors of domestic violence secure permanent housing.
Many survivors have no power over their finances, she said, and when they flee abuse, they might leave behind important financial paperwork, notably tax returns.
Not requiring those returns for employed applicants “will be a huge help, especially for survivors.”
“Their abusers may be holding onto their income tax information,” Requena said. “The fact that this is something to reduce that burden is going to help house survivors more quickly.”
Patrick Boyle, senior director for the New York office of Enterprise Community Partners, said it currently takes about 14 months on average for a new affordable housing project in New York City to be leased up — or filled with tenants.
“A lot of it does have to do with onerous paperwork, things that need to be collected around bank statements, things that you have to sort of pull together on behalf of the tenants and make sure the tenants have,” Boyle said. “We have so many people that need the affordable housing — so many people rent-burdened, doubled up — and the quicker we can get people from those situations into permanent affordable housing the better.”
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