227,000 Names on List Vie for Rare Vacancies in City’s Public Housing
Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times
Lottie Mitchell, who lives with her 35-year-old disabled son in a homeless shelter, has been on the waiting list for a New York City Housing Authority apartment for four years.
By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: July 23, 2013
Lottie Mitchell made her regular pilgrimage the other week, riding the subway for 45 minutes, then transferring to a bus to reach her destination: an office of the New York City Housing Authority.
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Maria Almonte, right, and her daughters, from left, Genesis Rodriguez, 12, and Giselle Rodriguez, 20, are on the long list of people seeking New York City public housing.
Ángel Franco/The New York Times
Maria Almonte, holding a letter from the New York City Housing Authority acknowledging her application. She says she cannot afford their current apartment.
When her turn came, Ms. Mitchell, 57, using a cane, hobbled to the counter with the same request that she has made for the last four years.
“I want to check the status on my housing,” she said.
As always, the clerk responded: “You’re on the waiting list.”
It is called the Tenant Selection and Assignment Plan, but to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers seeking a home, it is “the list.”
Prosperous city residents may consider public housing to be a place of last resort. The waiting list indicates otherwise.
The growth in the list — and the stories of those who struggle to move up on it to gain subsidized apartments — underscores how the city continues to face a shortage of housing for the poor and the working class.
There are now 227,000 individuals and families on the waiting list for Housing Authority apartments, totaling roughly half a million people, and the queue moves slowly. The apartments are so coveted that few leave them. Only 5,400 to 5,800 open up annually.
The odds, never good, are getting worse. This year, after the agency began accepting applications online, the waiting list reached a milestone: for the first time, the number of applicants exceeded the 178,900 apartments in the public housing stock.
“It’s become harder and harder to be able to afford a rental unit in the open market,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing policy analyst with the Community Service Society, a research and advocacy group for the poor. “Whether employment is up or down, the rents keep rising inexorably.”
Federal law prevents housing authorities from building additional units. With federal aid declining, the New York City agency also faces difficulty maintaining the projects that it has.
The average monthly rent for a public housing apartment is $436, officials said. The average household’s income is $23,000. (Tenants are required to pay up to 30 percent of their household income in rent.)
But low income alone does not determine who gets an apartment, and the waiting list is not run on a first-come-first-served basis.
Officials favor groups of applicants in order to further policy goals. Some, like victims of domestic violence, are given priority. Others, like working families, are preferred because they can pay higher rents and also help diversify the projects so they do not segregate the poor.
Those with a high priority can jump the line and may get an apartment in as little as three months. Others will wait years — with little if any prospect of getting off the list.
In 2005, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took away preferences for homeless people staying in city shelters, arguing that the policy was an incentive for them to enter the shelter system in order to obtain public housing more easily.
As a result, the number of homeless families who enter public housing from shelters dropped to about 100 last year from an average of 1,600 a year before the policy changed, according to city figures.
Waiting times also depend on the type of apartment. An applicant who needs a two-bedroom will be on the list for less time than a single person who needs a studio, because only 3.5 percent of the authority’s apartments are studios, compared with 48 percent that have two bedrooms.
Manhattan is more difficult to move into because of high demand and because there is not as much public housing as in other boroughs. Staten Island is the easiest.
Ms. Mitchell has been on the waiting list since 2009. Once, she got plucked from the line for an eligibility interview.
“We were so excited,” said Ms. Mitchell, who lives with her 35-year-old disabled son in a city homeless shelter. “They said they’d call me back real soon.”
That was a year and a half ago.
Since then, Ms. Mitchell has gone twice a year to a Housing Authority office in the Bronx to check on her application.
She also has called. She has sent letters of reference. She has prodded the staffs of both the Bronx and Manhattan borough presidents to inquire on her behalf.
Still, an apartment remains out of reach.
Because some people can jump ahead, no one ever knows his or her place on the list or how long the wait will be.
“Every time I call, they don’t say anything,” said Maria Almonte, 42, who said she was behind in the rent for the $1,300-a-month, two-bedroom apartment she shares with two daughters in Washington Heights. Her monthly income of $1,800 is from child support, disability payments and food stamps.
“They say, ‘You’re on the waiting list, you’re on the waiting list,’ ” she said. “Sometimes I feel such anxiety because of the uncertainty.”
Applicants said they felt as if they were playing the lottery.
Kolaundria Gee, who lives in a shelter with her 3-year-old son while working full time at a day care center, said she checked on her application so often that she developed a rapport with an authority worker who answered her calls.
“He said to think positive,” Ms. Gee said. “Sometimes, we talked for up to two minutes.”
In May, she learned that the worker had retired.
“I cried,” Ms. Gee, 27, said. “With him, I felt a little hope.”
The most resourceful applicants turn to an ecosystem of helpers — legal aid lawyers, advocacy groups, borough president offices, City Council members — to try to move things along.
But advocates from several organizations said the most they could do was to get the authority to review an application to find out if any documents were missing, causing a holdup, or if the person forgot to include details that would mean a higher place on the list.
“They think I can get them an apartment faster,” said Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, the chairwoman of the subcommittee on public housing. “We tell them there’s no way.”
In a few cases, people have forged police and financial records to gain an edge, housing officials said.
But the officials maintained that their computerized system helps deter corruption.
“People can’t manipulate the list,” said Alan Pelikow, assistant director in the office of resident policy and administration. “It assures that people get a fair shake at housing.”
But any change in circumstance — losing a job, gaining a job, having a baby — can shift a priority, or affect eligibility for an available apartment of a certain size.
Hurricane Sandy showed how precarious a place in the line can be. To respond to the emergency, city officials temporarily froze the waiting list this year and set aside 470 apartments for evacuees who lost their homes.
When she had her eligibility interview in 2011, Ms. Mitchell was stunned to learn that because she had stopped working for health reasons between the date she applied for an apartment and the interview, she and her son were downgraded a notch — from homeless working family to just plain homeless — and lost an edge.
On her visit to the Housing Authority’s customer center in the Bronx last month, the woman on the other side of the counter looked at her computer and told Ms. Mitchell that her application had expired in April.
She asked how much time she had to reapply, to avoid losing her place on the list. Probably six months, the worker said. (In fact, the grace period is only 30 days, housing officials said.)
Later, Ms. Mitchell, who suffers from scoliosis, seemed deflated but no less persistent.
“You have to find out the hard way,” she said. “You really have to stay on top of it yourself or you lose it.”
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