New York City officials say they are determined to make living in the Five Boroughs more affordable. That puts the spotlight on the NYC Housing Connect housing lottery for what many say is a slow, complicated, and bureaucratic leasing process. Mayor Zohran Mamdani is aiming to speed things up.
“We’ve talked about the need to change Housing Connect because we have heard a number of frustrations from New Yorkers, and frustrations are an opportunity to do better,” said Mamdani during an appearance on SiriusXM’s “The Clay Cane Show,” August 8.
In 2024, Housing Connect, under the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), distributed an estimated 10,000 units of income-restricted rental units to New Yorkers, with about 6 million applications filed for those buildings, according to a New York University (NYU) Furman Center report.
The applicants included city workers, people living in shelters, veterans, and low-income New Yorkers who are supposed to have priority for buildings in their community districts.
To apply for the lottery, people go to an online portal and fill out their current address, income, assets, household information, ethnicity, race, disability status, preferred unit size, and whether they receive rental assistance. However, the NYU report stated that about 50% of applicants never engage with the documentation process, even though that’s the first step. Sometimes by the time the agency responds, an applicant may have found another option or moved out of the city altogether.
“We found that the vast majority of applicants will not make it to the end of the process, either because of attrition where the applicant is not being meaningfully engaged or is dropping out or because of explicit rejection where the applicant fails to provide documentation or is found ineligible,” the authors of the NYU report wrote.
The median time to approve an applicant through the lottery process was more than four months in 2025, said the report. NYU estimated that about 77% of applicants will end up rejected, while others will withdraw their applications because they don’t receive a formal final status of rejected or approved. Of those approved, approximately half don’t get assigned an apartment right away, sometimes because one isn’t available or they were found “ineligible” later on.
Combined with the up to 76 days that a building’s lottery stays open and the “unknown number of days” it takes to complete lease-signings, audits, appeals, and complaints, the process is absolutely too long, said the NYU report.
In January, Mamdani created an interagency task force by executive order to figure out how to streamline administrative processes, such as NYC Housing Connect, that are slowing down connecting people in need to apartments. The administration released the Streamlining Procedures to Expedite Equitable Development (SPEED) report in May 2026, outlining the short-term and long-term goals of speeding up the affordable housing “lease-up” system. The SPEED report noted that the lengthy delays in leasing are especially hard on individuals living in shelters.
“The Mayor’s housing plan, Block by Block, lays out a series of vital changes that will reimagine the entire lottery process from the ground up, with the goal of reducing wait times and making it easier for eligible New Yorkers to access our affordable housing stock,” said HPD’s Deputy Press Secretary Kim Moscaritolo in a statement. “While we’re working to overhaul these systems, we shouldn’t ignore the existing successes; for each of the nearly 15,000 families who received affordable housing through HPD’s Housing Connect and Homeless Placements pathways in FY 2025 alone, it has been life-changing.”
The Block by Block plan is intended to modernize and reimagine Housing Connect’s entire lottery process from the ground up, with the goal of reducing the median lease-up time from 210 days to fewer than 100 days, said HPD.
HPD said it is currently in the process of making a series of changes that will shorten the lottery application period, streamline income verification processes, and improve cumbersome paper application reviews. This will include reducing the amount of time lotteries remain open to 21 days; simplifying income verification, starting with the easiest documents to obtain; streamlining paper application requirements; simplifying guidelines for both property managers and applicants; and streamlining the applicant selection process.
“We are also launching new and fixing existing programs to more efficiently move homeless New Yorkers from shelters into permanent affordable homes, including supportive housing,” said HPD.
While HPD is working on making the lottery system more efficient, Mamdani recently announced a “Fix the City” push to fast-track critical housing court cases as well. Housing court judges will expedite cases involving vacate orders, hazardous conditions or elevator outages, and landlord neglect. The intent is to deliver on promises of justice and repairs for the city’s tenants, said the city.
