What It’s Like to Win the New York City Affordable-Housing Lottery | Invesloan.com

• For some New Yorkers, winning the NYC housing lottery is the only way they can afford to stay in the city.
• But competition is tough: There are about 3.5 million applications each year.
• Those who have won say it often took multiple applications and months of waiting before they heard back.

Louis Ciprian, 29, moved around New York City a lot when he was younger.

His father died when he was 11, and Ciprian and his mother fell on hard times. At 15, he entered the foster care system. For the next couple of years, he bounced from place to place and even graduated from high school while living in a homeless shelter.

After college, he started couch surfing, living with different roommates while looking for a more permanent place to call home.

In 2022, he started applying for the New York City affordable housing lottery, which is run by the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and the Housing Development Corporation (HDC).

Two years later, in July, Ciprian finally received the call that he’d been waiting for: He won the lottery for a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx, where rent is $1,481 a month.

He was thankful and relieved.

“To be able to get an opportunity like that where I’m paying rent that is affordable and not going to hit more than 30% of my income, it’s an amazing feeling,” Ciprian, a customer success manager at a real estate technology company, told Business Insider.

After years of grappling with homelessness, he now has a place of his own.

1 in 450 chance of winning

NYC is experiencing a severe housing affordability crisis.

From 2022 to 2023, rents in NYC increased seven times as fast as wages, a Zillow and StreetEasy analysis found. Even tech workers — who make an average of $135,000 annually — can only afford 35% of rentals in the city.

It’s not surprising that many lower-earning New Yorkers are choosing to leave the city or even the country entirely in order to enjoy a lower cost of living.

For those still in NYC, the outlook is far from rosy. Over the past decade, the city grew by nearly 800,000 people, but only added 200,000 new homes, mayor Eric Adams said in a speech in December 2022.

Not only that, the city has also lost some 100,000 apartments — many in wealthy neighborhoods — because New Yorkers keep consolidating multi-family buildings and turning them into one- or two-family homes.

A 2023 city housing and vacancy survey found that only 1.4% of NYC apartments were available to rent last year, and over 40% of all renters spend 30% or more of their income on rent.

For many New Yorkers like Ciprian, winning the housing lottery is their only hope of securing an affordable apartment in an increasingly expensive city.

While the application is free, each household must meet specific income requirements to qualify for an apartment. But winning the affordable housing lottery is a feat in itself.

The HPD receives about 3.5 million applications a year, Natasha Kersey, an HPD representative, told BI.

On average, there are 450 applications received per rental unit.

With competition so stiff, it is not uncommon for people to apply for multiple apartments offered in the lottery.

Nkenge Clarke, 30, told BI previously that she had sent out over 130 applications before she finally succeeded in her bid.

“It took me maybe over a year before I started hearing back from different properties that I applied to,” Clarke said. “Some of them I ended up not qualifying for, some of them I didn’t provide enough documentation for.”

Now, she pays about $1,000 in rent every month for a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, a neighborhood on the west side of Manhattan. The timing was impeccable; her previous landlord was looking to raise her rent had she renewed her lease.

“This place literally came just in time, like a few months before my second-year lease ended,” Clarke said.

While the process took a lot of paperwork and patience, it was well worth the effort, she added. After all, living in an affordable apartment in the heart of the city was like a dream come true.

Stabilized rent in an ever-expensive market

Interested parties can apply for the affordable housing lottery online via the Housing Connect portal or by mail. Once the deadline passes, all applications are combined to create a pool from which the lottery is conducted, Aileen Reynolds, the assistant commissioner of housing opportunity at HPD, told BI.

A computer algorithm randomizes all the applications and assigns everyone a number, known as a lottery log number. That number, she added, dictates the order in which the developers have to contact the applicants.

While it helps applicants get a sense of where they stand, it’s not a perfect science since there might be people who applied but do not qualify for the apartments.

It can take any time between weeks to months for an applicant to hear back, Reynolds said.

In Josh Ayala’s case, it took him eight months to receive a call back after he had applied for his apartment.

“I was like, wait, what? I totally forgot I applied to this,” Ayala, 26, told BI in August.

Thankfully, it all worked out for him; He signed the lease for the apartment within a month of the viewing. Now he pays $2,345 in monthly rent, which is stabilized.

“Around COVID-19 time, people were moving into apartments, and for one year, it was a great price. But the next year, the landlord would just increase their rent exorbitantly,” Ayala said. “I didn’t want that to happen to me, so I wanted something that was more secure, too.”

Likewise, rent stabilization was the main reason Brynne McManimie and Peter Romano started applying for the housing lottery.

In 2021, they lived in a $2,600-a-month apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. They had gotten a good deal on their lease due to the pandemic, but it didn’t last long.

“After a year, our landlord raised our rent by like 25% and it made us very nervous about staying in that apartment,” McManimie told BI in June. Their new rent was going to be $3,300 a month, and they decided it was too expensive for them to afford.

But luck was on their side: Within a month of applying for the housing lottery, they were contacted about a one-bedroom unit in Brooklyn.

The couple ended up signing a two-year lease. Now, they pay $2,800 in monthly rent.

“Since it’s rent-stabilized, they can’t raise it like a ton,” Romano told BI. “Which is honestly really attractive to us, given what happened with our last landlord.”

The income and household eligibility criteria for the lottery apartments only apply at the initial stage.

“Folks only need to qualify based on house size and income at the time they move in,” Reynolds said.

‘Native New Yorkers deserve to stay here’

But the housing lottery isn’t without its criticism.

For years, the city’s “community preference” policy dictated that half of new affordable apartments must first be offered to those already living in the area.

However, in 2015, three women filed a lawsuit against the city, saying that the policy reinforced segregation.

After almost a decade, the city finally agreed to settle the lawsuit in January. Under the terms of the settlement, the city will reduce the percentage of affordable houses set aside for those already living in the same community to 20%, down from the original 50%, per court documents. In May 2029, it will drop to 15%.

“Although the preference has been reduced, the outcome allows us to preserve it and continue to do our work by advocating for New Yorkers that need more housing at deeply affordable levels,” Kersey said.

Still, NYC residents do get priority in the affordable housing lottery — although applicants don’t need to be US citizens, Reynolds said.

In the meantime, the housing lottery will still be one of the best ways for New Yorkers to stay in affordable apartments in the city.

“As much as I’m for the housing lottery, I think that it does suck that as a native, sometimes the only hope and dream of staying in the city affordably is this route,” Ceronne Mitchell, who pays $1,600 a month for her one-bedroom lottery housing apartment in Queens, told BI previously.

“Native New Yorkers deserve to stay here, and I’m always proud when one can,” she added.