Newly built affordable apartments in New York City can remain unoccupied for more than a year, according to a new report from Enterprise Community Partners, a nonprofit that helps build affordable housing.
The nonprofit analyzed its portfolio of over 800 affordable housing projects nationwide, including 50 in the five boroughs of New York City.
Enterprise said it found that across more than 4,500 affordable apartments in New York City, a median of 439 days passed between when a building’s apartments were finished and when new tenants moved in.
It said that the shortest leasing timeline was about 8.5 months, while the longest was over two years.
The City reported that it took 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, about two years to secure her current apartment in Jamaica, Queens.
Lengthy Move-In Delays
“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. She requested her last name be withheld for safety concerns. “The entire experience was extremely grueling.”
According to the Enterprise Report, the median time for New York City tenants to move into affordable housing — that is, government-subsidized and income-restricted apartments — is nearly three times as long as the national median time of 156 days.
The City noted that the report comes as several housing experts and affordable housing operators have called on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to streamline the process of placing New Yorkers into these affordable apartments.
There are many impediments to filling buildings with tenants, The City reported, and developers cited long processing times to get residents approved and overcoming multiple layers of bureaucracy as the most common roadblocks.
“Broadly speaking, let affordable housing owners just fill these buildings with people in need,” said Patrick Boyle, Senior Policy Director at Enterprise. “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.”
Streamlining the Process
For its part, the city government aims to streamline the process by reducing bureaucratic red tape.
The day he took office, Mayor Zohran Mamdani convened the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) Task Force to figure out how to quicken the pace of building and leasing up housing, The City reported. That task force was due to issue a report with recommendations by April 11, but City Hall indicated it’d be out in the coming weeks instead.
“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,” mayoral spokesperson Matt Rauschenbach said.
According to The City, the NYC housing agency’s own data encompasses a wider universe of projects than Enterprise’s analysis and shows a shorter, but still concerning, timeline to fully lease buildings: a median of 210 days to complete approvals for affordable housing applicants.
Enterprise said its analysis found there have been more delays in leasing the buildings in its portfolio over time: 13% of Enterprise’s projects experienced delays between 2013 and 2016, while all of them did between 2021 and 2024.
Expensive Delays
Delays can cost millions of dollars for affordable housing owners, many of which are nonprofits operating at a loss or close to it.
Those delays can disincentivize investors to finance more affordable housing in the future, Boyle said.
It takes time and many steps to get affordable buildings ready to be listed on Housing Connect, the platform where New Yorkers can apply for apartments and homes through a lottery. And then there are other layers of approvals and long processes to find and greenlight eligible residents. That means some operators of homeless shelters that also run affordable housing projects aren’t able to place residents of their shelters directly into the apartments.
Some would-be residents need additional approvals, especially if they hold a rent voucher, like the city-funded CityFHEPS.
CityFHEPS requires tenants to submit documentation for city approval, and there has to be an inspection of the apartment before renters can move in.
