Newly built affordable apartments across New York City are sitting empty for more than a year on average while thousands of New Yorkers sleep in shelters, double up in cramped apartments, or wait years for a shot at stable housing. The numbers are stark.
A report released Friday by Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps finance and build affordable housing, found that across more than 4,500 affordable apartments in the five boroughs, a median of 439 days passed between when units were finished and when tenants actually moved in. The shortest leasing timeline clocked in at roughly eight and a half months. The longest stretched past two years. That median is nearly three times the national figure of 156 days, which Enterprise calculated from its portfolio of more than 800 affordable housing projects across the country.
Three times as long. For apartments that are already built. Already paid for.
The report draws on Enterprise’s portfolio of more than 50 New York City projects among those 800-plus nationwide. Developers and housing operators pointed to the same culprits over and over: long processing times to get residents approved and multiple layers of bureaucracy that stack on top of each other, each one adding weeks to the wait.
Patrick Boyle, senior policy director at Enterprise, put it plainly. “Broadly speaking, let affordable housing owners just fill these buildings with people in need,” Boyle said. “It’s important to be sure the process runs fairly so people have sort of an equal chance at being placed, but when you layer in too much process, you’re hurting the people that you’re trying to help.”
That’s not abstract. Ayah, a 29-year-old mother who spent three years living in a city shelter with her 5-year-old son after leaving an abusive marriage, took roughly two years to land her current apartment in Jamaica, Queens. She asked that her last name be withheld for safety reasons.
“Even though I’m so grateful to be in my own space, it just felt like I had to jump through so many hoops and it just felt so exhausting and absolutely humiliating,” Ayah said. “The entire experience was extremely grueling.”
Two years. Her son was in a shelter for most of his young life while a system designed to help them ground through its paperwork.
The finger-pointing tends to land on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, which oversees the approval pipeline for placing tenants into income-restricted units. Housing experts and affordable housing operators have been pushing HPD to streamline that process, and not just for the sake of people waiting for homes. Delays hurt the bottom line of property owners and investors who help finance affordable construction, which creates pressure that ripples back into whether new projects even get built in the first place.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani moved on the issue starting on his first day in office, convening the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development Task Force, known as SPEED, to find ways to speed up both building and leasing. The task force was due to deliver its recommendations by April 11. City Hall said this week the report will come out in the coming weeks instead. A small delay, one hopes, for a process meant to cut delays.
“All options are on the table as we review these recommendations and work to get New Yorkers into available affordable housing units as quickly as possible,” a mayoral spokesperson said, according to the reporting.
The City first reported on the Enterprise findings Friday, including Ayah’s account.
The broader affordable housing crunch in New York is not news to anyone paying rent here. But this particular failure is its own category of frustrating. These aren’t units stuck in planning. They’re not waiting on permits or financing. The concrete is poured, the walls are up, the keys exist. The hold-up is paperwork. Process. Bureaucratic sequencing that serves the system’s internal logic better than it serves the people the system was built to house.
For riders on the J and Z trains heading into Jamaica, or anyone who’s watched new construction go up in their neighborhood and wondered why the lights stay off for so long, this report gives a number to what a lot of people already suspected. Four hundred and thirty-nine days. That’s not a backlog. That’s a policy choice, and the city needs to treat it like one.