While Mayor Bill de Blasio this week boasted the city has built a record amount of affordable housing under his administration, State Sen. Jesse Hamilton (D-Flatbush, Park Slope, Brownsville, Sunset Park) called for a review of the affordable housing lottery process to ensure New Yorkers don’t give up before they even get in the door.
Yesterday Hamilton requested an audit from City Comptroller Scott Stringer on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) housing lottery system after receiving multiple constituent complaints about mismanagement at all stages of the housing lottery process.
“People feel they are getting the runaround from unresponsive developers or HPD representatives” Hamilton said in urging Stringer to revisit the lottery procedure that has been plagued by inefficiency for at least a decade.
In 2009, former Comptroller Bill Thompson ordered a review of the lottery, and in 2012 former Comptroller John Liu made another audit, finding both HPD negligence, and undue influence by building owners in the application process.
Liu’s main recommendations for HPD were to maintain complete oversight of the application process, to continue to streamline the online application, and to create a more robust and responsive complaint system.
Hamilton wants to not only follow-up on HPD’s progress since the Liu audit, but also to expand the analysis to examine the lottery from the “perspective of the applicant.”
Hamilton said constituent complaints ranged from being asked for the same information multiple times, being ignored by representatives, and being given insufficient explanations of decisions and processes. Hamilton believes his constituent complaints signal a citywide systemic problem in the housing lottery process that must be reviewed and corrected.
The audit request comes on the heels of de Blasio’s announcement of a record number of affordable housing units financed in 2017. With 24,536 homes pipelined in the last year, the city eclipsed the record of 23,100 set by Mayor Koch in 1989. De Blasio also announced the addition of 5,300 affordable housing units to the housing lottery in 2017, doubling the rate from four years ago.
In regard to the new audit request, HPD Spokesperson Juliet Pierre-Antoine said the agency has made several improvements to the lottery, including the creation in 2014 of the Housing Ambassadors program, which partners with community organizations to help applicants throughout the lengthy process.
Pierre-Antoine said HPD has also created a more robust online presence, Housing Connect, where residents can find about all aspects of the housing lottery and apply online. Finally, it has expanded and improved its marketing strategy, translating housing lottery information into seven new languages and creating a marketing best practices guidebook for building owners, she said.
Hamilton acknowledges that while the housing lottery will not completely solve the affordable housing crisis, but called it an “important tool” in fighting for affordable housing for all New Yorkers and must be used as effectively as possible.
