It takes an average of 210 days to get an affordable housing building filled in New York City. The Mamdani administration says it plans to cut that in half.
The plan to fill projects in 100 days was revealed alongside changes to the city’s permitting and environmental review processes.
Reforms to the lease-up system will include shortening the lottery application period from 60 days to 21 days for all projects, shortening the timeline for marketers to select applicants, and piloting a new program to allow landlords to work directly with shelters. They were announced as part of the city’s first report from the SPEED task force, created by executive order by Mayor Zohran Mamdani to accelerate affordable housing development.
“The team here was not unaware of this,” Dinah Levy, commissioner of the city’s housing preservation and development department, said of complaints about long lease-up periods. “They were digging into this for a long time.”
The announcements come after significant lobbying from nonprofit organizations.
In just the last few months at least three organizations have put out reports about New York’s lengthy lease-up process. Those include lender Enterprise Community Partners, the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, and the Furman Center at New York University.
“It did start to feel a little bit like, ‘Okay, we get it,’” joked Levy.
HPD has been concerned with issues of fairness and transparency for applicants. Levy said she believes the changes can balance those objectives with moving quickly.
Enterprise Community Partners, a lender, found that it takes three times longer to fill an affordable housing project in New York City compared to the national median. Patrick Boyle, Enterprise’s senior director of policy in New York, said checks in the system are usually well-intentioned, but can go too far and make the process actually less fair.
“When it takes over 430 days to fully lease up an affordable housing property, that’s not fair to the people who are in homeless shelters or doubled up, or on wait lists,” Boyle said in April. “In effect you’re hurting the people you’re trying to protect.”
Other major changes among the 52-item list in the report include streamlining office conversions, beefing up fire department capacity to issue approvals, and adding a new team at HPD and the mayor’s office to speed up financing.
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