After New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) resident Elizabeth began receiving verbal harassment and sexual threats from a neighbor, she submitted an emergency transfer request for herself and her family to move to a new development. When NYCHA approved the request in the spring of 2022, about a month after she submitted it, she felt relief.
“That communicated to [me] that this will happen very quickly,” she said in Spanish.
But almost three years later, Elizabeth, who asked not to use her last name, is still waiting for a transfer.
“It has been really tough. In the beginning, I trusted that NYCHA would understand that I’m a woman and that I was threatened, and that they would get me out of here,” Elizabeth said.
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Under the federal Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), NYCHA is obligated to facilitate transfers for survivors of sexual violence, intimate partner violence, dating violence, and stalking. However, a recent report by the nonprofit Legal Services NYC found that these survivors have faced lengthy waits to move after being granted a transfer. According to statistics that NYCHA shared with the AmNews, the average wait time for a transfer is currently 799 days — more than two years.
“So you’re a survivor of domestic violence, you experienced abuse, you request an emergency transfer, NYCHA approves that emergency transfer… but on average, you’re going to wait 800 days until you can reach a safe apartment,” said Legal Services NYC attorney Luis Henriquez, one of the report’s authors.
According to the report, roughly 2,000 survivors of gender-based violence — mostly Black and Latinx women — were waiting to be transferred as of September. The report included the stories of three other women who have faced significant transfer delays, including one who was hospitalized while awaiting a transfer after being attacked by a person associated with her abuser.
The backlog results in part from the fact that in NYCHA’s transfer ranking system, VAWA transfers are in the lowest priority category — 11 other types of transfers are prioritized above these transfers, meaning those tenants must be relocated first. In 2023, 3,624 people were on the waitlist for these higher-priority transfers.
Some of these transfers are for emergency situations, such as if an apartment has become uninhabitable due to health, safety, or environmental concerns, but other transfer categories are often not emergency situations, such as when a tenant is living in an under-occupied unit.
In addition, VAWA transfers receive equal priority to a variety of other transfers, including those for non-emergency situations. For example, transfers for tenants who live more than 90 minutes from work, or who are having friction with a neighbor, have equal priority to VAWA transfers. New applicants who have been approved by NYCHA also receive the same priority. In 2023, 16,374 people were on the waitlist for these categories.
As a result of this system, “2,000 — almost entirely Black and Latinx women — [are] waiting for [VAWA] emergency transfers in a group of 16,000 tenants waiting for transfers, most of which have nothing to do with emergency situations,” Henriquez said.
Because U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) regulations require that public housing authorities give emergency transfers the same level of priority as transfers for other emergency situations, such as if an apartment becomes uninhabitable due to physical hazards, the report contends that NYCHA’s transfer priority rankings violate federal regulations.
NYCHA’s “vacant unit crisis” has also contributed to the delays, Henriquez said. In 2023, NYCHA had 5,000 vacant units. According to the report, the amount of time it takes NYCHA to re-rent vacant apartments increased from 98 days in 2020 to 424 days in 2024. A decline in staff responsible for turning over these units helps explain this sharp increase in turnover time. The report found that between 2018 and 2023, NYCHA accumulated a total of 6,000 vacancies among this staff.
“The combination of a ton of vacant units, plus an exceedingly low transfer priority, is really a double whammy in terms of what survivors of domestic violence have to go through,” Henriquez said.
In a statement, NYCHA spokesperson Andrew Sklar said that “NYCHA continues to evaluate its transfer policies on a regular basis and strives to facilitate VAWA transfers as quickly and efficiently as possible — and with enhanced transparency — while aligning with applicable laws and regulations, consent decrees, and other requirements.”
The agency also noted that it saw an 87% increase in completed emergency transfers from 2023 to 2024, and that the average wait time for emergency transfers has gone down by 81 days from 2023 to 2024. The agency also said that it was working to revise the way it prioritizes transfers.
Henriquez said that Legal Services NYC had a conversation with NCYHA last summer in which staffers said they were considering increasing the priority of emergency transfers. However, NYCHA has not yet provided any concrete plans.
“They haven’t given us a timeline as to when that will happen,” Henriquez said. “We’re still waiting, but I think it is safe to say that NYCHA understands that this is something that they can and should fix.”
The report pointed to Boston and Oakland public housing authorities’ transfer systems as potential models for NYCHA. Both cities put VAWA transfer applicants at the top of their waitlists, as highlighted by a recent Government Accountability Office report on emergency transfer systems across the country.
The other recommendations from Legal Service NYC’s report include addressing the vacant unit crisis, hiring a VAWA transfer coordinator, and allowing residents to qualify for a Section 8 voucher immediately after their transfer is approved. Currently, applicants are required to wait for three years.
Elizabeth said securing a Section 8 voucher is now her main hope. It is approaching three years since she submitted her transfer request, and her neighbor has continued to harass both her and her children.
“I’ve just been left to deal with this situation myself, so I have tried to be as tough as I can to protect myself,” she said.
Shannon Chaffers is a Report for America corps member who writes about gun violence for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.