Lottery Dreams
Thousands apply in the hope of finding an affordable apartment. Most lose. And resent the winners.
By Chloe Picchio
Three thousand two hundred dollars. For New Yorkers that is almost three months of groceries or 26 unlimited subway passes. And as of this year, that is the median average rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Williamsburg.
For many families, this expense is out of their reach without the assistance of the Affordable Housing Lottery and Section 8 vouchers. The vouchers allow people to rent affordable apartments, often in luxury buildings — if their number is chosen. The statistical randomness of the lottery system promises an equal chance to all. Many, however, disagree. Countless articles and message boards promote ways to game the system and win.
But is it really a game? And if so, who wins and who loses?
Space is at a premium in Brooklyn, one of the most desirable locations in the United States. Yet there are still open areas, vestiges of industry from generations past. The site of the former Pfizer plant — located on the “Broadway Triangle” border of Williamsburg and Bedford-Stuyvesant — which began operation in 1848 and closed in 2008 sprawls over nearly 15 acres of factories, parking lots, and abandoned fields. The city earmarked the site in 2006 for redevelopment, which drew the interest of various community groups.
“What’s gonna happen here exactly?” asked Father Astor Rodriguez, 52, a priest at St. John the Baptist Roman Catholic Church in Bedford Stuyvesant. “What are you converting this to because we understand there has to be housing. There needs to be housing. But are the people that are in the neighborhood being taken care of or being taken into account, at least?”
For those who rely on the housing lottery, empty Pfizer lots like the one at 200 Harrison Avenue offer a glimmer of hope. Now a collection of gravel and wild shrubs, the developer of the lot, the Rabsky Group, envisions the building as an expansive ideal of apartment living, with ample green space and amenities. Of the 1,146 proposed units, 287 will be priced below market rate, a result of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s 2016 housing initiatives. These initiatives included the creation of mandatory inclusionary housing, which grants extensive tax incentives to developers who price 25 to 30 percent of their units at 40 to 80 percent of the area’s median income.
This should be cause for celebration. But instead, it has reopened a decades-old fight between two of the poorer communities in Williamsburg — Latinos and the Satmar Hasidim. Those tensions erupted in the 1970s when Churches United charged that a disproportionate number of Hasidim gained places in subsidized housing, which enraged the equally needy Latino community. Although the resulting lawsuits resolved this disparity, lingering resentment in both communities soured relations to this day.
Walking down the streets of the Broadway Triangle, you see a neighborhood in flux between poverty and opportunity. Among the pockets of new construction, glass-walled apartment buildings and glittering new yeshiva, are crumbling sidewalks and crowded prewar buildings, suggesting that many in both the Satmar and Latino communities are being left behind.
“We’re surrounded,” said Rodriguez, sitting behind his desk at a church enclosed with a 10-foot barbed wire fence. “Surrounded by poverty, surrounded by crime.”
Whatever hopes there were for cooperation ended this summer when a July 26th community board meeting devolved into a shouting match between protestors from Churches United for Fair Housing and community board members who were also a part of The United Jewish Housing Organization. Churches United, which represented the Latino community, alleged that the development by the Rabsky Group, a Hasidic-owned company, would be tailored to fit the large families and religious requirements of the Hasidim. They argue that this would purposely marginalize smaller Latino families from the lottery apartments. The Hasidic board members countered that these accusations were anti-Semitic.
Still, some still hope for a reconciliation if both sides can reach a middle ground.
“Of course you have those ultra-ultra groups on both sides that don’t want to cooperate and that creates problems with the fundamentalists on both sides,” said Father Bob Vitaglione, 69, who along with Father Rodriguez is a member of Churches United and is a priest at Mary Nazareth Roman Catholic Church in Fort Greene.
Despite numerous requests for comment, the United Jewish Housing Organization and other Satmar representatives declined to participate in interviews.
Even though construction has not even begun — and will not be completed until November 2019 — people are already calculating how they might win an apartment in the building. For families with children, common in both the Latino and Satmar communities, winning the lottery can be life-changing.
“If you are lucky enough to win the lottery your children will at least do better in the long term,” said Jamie Gracie, 22, a pre-doctoral research fellow at Stanford University’s Equality for Opportunity Project, which focuses on the long-term effects of housing vouchers.
Equality for Opportunity studies in 2007 and 2015 report that children’s success is proportional to the age in which their families receive vouchers and move out of overcrowded and unsafe homes. After overcoming periods of adjustment, children in voucher-secured apartments are more likely to graduate high school, less likely to be single parents, and often have higher incomes than did previous generations.
Yet, due to the high cost of living in urban life as well as the lingering inter-generational effects of poverty, Gracie said, “vouchers are not the golden tickets to a middle-class life.”
New York’s housing lottery presents a unique case, since many of its participants would be considered solidly middle-class in other parts of the country, with some lottery buildings accepting applicants with incomes well over $60,000. This, in turn, dramatically increases the pool of applicants, far beyond the formerly homeless and newly-arrived immigrants Gracie sees most often in her studies.
Despite suspicions and accusations of people trying to game the lottery, it is nonetheless designed to be as clinically detached as possible. Most decisions are number-driven to avoid violations of the Fair Housing Act, according to an applicant screener who asked to remain anonymous.
“The absolute basic (decision) is income,” he said. “Let’s say you have a building with an income limit of $30,000 to $40,000. People whose incomes fall outside of that will instantly be sent a rejection letter. A lot of the times people don’t put their income correctly — very few people ever actually do. It’s the gross (income) that counts. Often people put their take-home pay.”
But limits on income do not account for the various ways New Yorkers make money, especially for those lottery applicants in creative professions.
“The problem is that I work freelance, in film, in 52 weeks out of the year I might work 30 weeks. They took my paystub and multiplied it by 52 not 30, but I’m not making that throughout the year,” said Ola Ronke, 40, a freelance artist and yoga teacher from Bedford-Stuyvesant. “I don’t work all year long, but they won’t accept that. They weren’t willing to have a conversation about it. They saw my paystub, multiplied it by 52 and pushed me out the door.”
The applicant screener admitted that a potential obstacle to many larger families like the Hasidim is the lack of large apartments.
“The largest I’ve seen is a three bedroom, but that is exceedingly rare,” he said. “I’ve never even seen a four-bedroom.”
Despite trying unsuccessful for a lottery apartment for over two years himself, the screener still argues that accusations of people gaming the system are exaggerated.
“Across the board it’s so ridiculous,” he said. “We don’t really catch enough people or there’s not enough people gaming the system for that to be worth it. Say you rent 100 units and one out of 100 sneaks their way in. You spend so much time trying to catch this person while the other 99 units are fine.”
On October 10, the Rabsky group announced that the subsidized apartments in the new building will be divided equally — with 71 each of one, two, three, and, in this building, four-bedroom apartments. Latino advocates, however, argued that this constituted a purposeful move by the Hasidim to shut out others. The Rabsky group responded with data from the 2010 census, which showed that the overwhelming majority of families with five or more members in the zip code were white, thereby justifying the larger apartments. It is highly likely that these larger apartments will go to the Hasidim, a trend that the housing screener called “not surprising.”
He said that for the city’s Housing Authority it is an issue of economy of space, “You can’t get a four-bedroom apartment and put two people in it.”
Although the Housing Authority’s intent may be to produce an egalitarian system in theory, the data in practice tells a different story and neither the Satmar nor the Latino communities are categorically winning.
“I would say I’m a unicorn, but two of my very good friends from college won housing lotteries and are currently living in their apartments,” said David Gordon, 29, a journalist.
According to a DNA.info study, individuals under the age of 35, typified by people like Gordon, win the most lotteries, with 50 percent of apartments being allocated to single people as either studios or one-bedrooms. Although African-American and Latino residents still get the majority of units, 10 percent of those lottery units go to people who identify as white — even though very few white individuals in the city are considered low-income. Neither of these categorizations favor Satmar or Latino families.
The result, said Gracie, the Stanford researcher, was limited impact for lottery winners. “It’s likely if you take a single person in their 30s from point A to point B they will benefit to the same extent as versus a young child,” she said.
Gordon himself won a place in an 83-unit lottery building in Astoria, which was a convenient commute to his work in Midtown Manhattan. He admits that the building seems to have “a lot of white people” although he does not know his neighbors well. Brooklyn was strategically out of the question when Gordon applied.
“Everyone wants to move to Brooklyn now and some areas are more wanted than others,” he said. “I don’t mind having a longer commute but some people will.”
Gordon believed that his success was most likely due to his thoroughness; he brought in every potential document associated with the lottery application, even if they were not directly applicable to him. Echoing the advice of the housing screener, he only applied to buildings which precisely matched the building’s income requirements. But ultimately, he thinks it was a case of good fortune.
“I like to joke that I’ll never win the Hamilton lottery now,” he laughed. “But someone’s got to get it so why not me? I’m not as flippant as I sound.”
For the few who win the lottery, there are also thousands who lose. Some try for decades and apply to scores of buildings without ever receiving that crucial phone call informing them they’ve won. The staggering number of applicants, sometimes over 100,000 for one building, contribute to ever-expanding waitlists and paperwork backlogs. Many interviewed mentioned the longstanding joke that it is easier to get struck by lightning than get into a lottery building, but also lamented the issues that arise for people struggling to make ends meet.
“It’s not our fault that we have quote-on-quote ‘big dreams’ and want to move to New York. And the only way we can afford the rent is it being split between two, three, four people,” said Sinclair Mitchell, 22, a college student and waiter who lives on the border of Bushwick and Ridgewood. “Of course, families who’ve lived here for years who are living on one income maybe two incomes can’t afford to live here and they get moved out. It’s reaching a point of when is it gonna bust. Because people have to work the service jobs and, if they can’t afford to live, are they going to continue to work here?”
Mitchell’s situation represents that of many millennials who come to New York with a dream but suddenly find themselves working in low-paying service jobs to meet their financial needs. Faced with expensive tuition and a high cost of living, she bounced from apartment to apartment in Brooklyn, moving annually from Brownsville, to Flatbush, to Bushwick in search of the cheapest rooms. Every move was preempted by either an issue with safety, unpredictable roommates, or a constantly increasing rent she could afford.
Native New Yorkers like Ola Ronke, who has lived in Bedford-Stuyvesant most of her adult life, share that sense of impossibility, “There was always this myth around subsidized housing in New York,” she said, “a romantic idea about finding an apartment based on how much you make.” But she has not found this to be the case, “It feels like we’re being violently pushed out, the rent is so high it’s almost offensive. Seeing rents of $2,800, it felt like a slap in the face to me.”
Neither woman lives in conditions suited for the long-term: Ronke shares a tiny studio with her 16-year old daughter and Mitchell lives with two roommates in a railroad apartment where one room is a hallway connecting the entire unit. Although adequate when her daughter was young, Ronke feels that the limited space deprives her of many of the things others take for granted, like a place to have friends over or a table to have family dinners.
Ronke and her nearly six-foot tall daughter have literally and figuratively outgrown their space. “I haven’t slept in a real bed in years,” she said. “I sleep on a loveseat and I know it’s affecting me physically.”
Like Gordon, both Mitchell and Ronke applied for the lottery with extensive paperwork. But neither Mitchell’s 50 applications nor Ronke’s 100 have succeeded. They recalled the many games of phone-tag, where officials called once but never left messages, or only offered appointments incompatible with their work schedules. Both also found aspects of the online application process difficult.
“You look up a certain project. This link takes you to this link where you have to go to this window and some of the links are expired, and I’m not sure if these are for the right units,” said Mitchell. “Housing Connect (the city’s official website) is easy, but if you go through these websites, I’m not sure if some projects were the same and some were different. It was so confusing and time-consuming I’ve almost given up.”
Considering that the average Brooklyn resident will spend 65 percent of their income on rent this year, it is impossible to determine who should win the lottery. No single group appears to be gaming the system, but the demographics of winners seems to coincide with the tide of gentrification, to produce a Brooklyn which will look drastically different than that of generations past.
For Ronke, winning the lottery would drastically improve her and her daughter’s quality of life. But she also wonders if the Brooklyn she would live in would feel like home.
“I feel that there are a lot of apartments going up throughout Brooklyn, there’s apartment buildings going up everywhere and who’s going to live in these buildings?” she said.” Is it going to stay diverse and vibrant? Just because I can’t pay thousands of dollars in rent that doesn’t mean I’m not a good tenant. I’m just hoping that building managers and property managers understand that it’s possible to have different classes living together and that it can be a beautiful thing.”
Follow Chloe Picchio at Twitter @chloepicchio and Instagram chloecaldwell
