Gothamist, Brittany Kriegstein, Paige Oamek, Jun 16, 2025

As New Yorkers face a critical shortage of affordable homes, city lawmakers are asking why thousands of public housing apartments are vacant — and why they are taking well over a year to fill on average.

The New York City Council’s public housing committee held a hearing Monday to question NYCHA officials on why units are staying empty longer and tenant transfers are moving so slowly. The hearing comes as the city’s overall vacancy rate for rental apartments considered affordable for the lowest-income residents remains below 1%.

“The transfer situation is appalling,” said Councilmember Alexa Avilés, who represents Red Hook, Sunset Park and other parts of south Brooklyn. “It has taken our office well over a year to transfer people facing violence, and it is particularly appalling when you know that there are thousands of vacant units in NYCHA.”

The housing authority serves about a half-million New Yorkers across hundreds of properties through traditional public housing and the Section 8 voucher program. Approximately 240,000 families are on the wait list for a traditional NYCHA apartment, and the authority’s public dashboard shows almost 6,000 units are empty.

But in response to questioning from committee chair Chris Banks, officials testified that the number of truly unoccupied units — counting those being held for resident relocations within the authority’s portfolio, substantial repairs or conversion to community uses — is more than 8,600. The nearly 6,000 figure reported by the agency includes more than 800 units matched to prospective tenants and awaiting lease-up, as well as units that unauthorized occupants may be living in, officials said.

NYCHA vacancies have been rising over the past year, and in the first four months of fiscal year 2025, it took an average of 423 days to turn over apartments for new tenants, councilmembers said. NYCHA has blamed the delays on aging infrastructure, with units typically requiring upgrades like new cabinets, doors and plumbing fixes, along with lead and asbestos testing. As of May, the average turnaround time was about 350 days, authority data shows.

The vacant apartments have put additional pressure on the city’s increasingly crowded homeless shelters. They also create safety risks, as experts say empty units can become focal points for crime and other illicit activities.

The Coalition for the Homeless, a nonprofit advocacy group, found in a report released last week that only 500 shelter residents were moved to vacant NYCHA units in 2024, down from 1,500 in 2021. Mayor Eric Adams’ administration said it is on track to double the number of shelter residents moving into public housing this fiscal year.

Advocates and low-income New Yorkers have criticized NYCHA’s slow transfer process, which can take months or even years to complete and can be particularly burdensome for victims of gender-based violence. Roughly 2,000 households who had applied for transfers as a result of domestic violence were on the wait list as of September, according to a report by the nonprofit Legal Services NYC. Most were headed by women.

At Monday’s hearing, the Council committee discussed a bill sponsored by Avilés that would require the authority to submit an annual report on public housing units that have been vacant for more than 30 days. NYCHA’s Chief Operating Officer Eva Trimble and Sylvia Aude, a senior vice president at the authority, said all its units must be vacant for more than 30 continuous days before they can be re-rented, because of required environmental work when tenants move out.

“On average, it takes four to six months to complete the lead and asbestos testing process, and abatement if necessary, during turnover,” Trimble said.

At the Red Hook Houses, officials said 1 in 10 apartments, or about 300, are vacant, including those where residents of the nearby Gowanus and Wyckoff Gardens developments could stay while repairs were made to their buildings.

“This is a tradeoff that we have to make between competing housing priorities, in order to improve our desperate housing stock and the needs of residents waiting for transfers,” said Trimble, who cited NYCHA’s roughly $80 billion in overall renovation needs and average tenancy of 25 years. “There is just simply not enough vacancies to do everything.”

She added that the authority has re-rented more than 530 apartments per month since last June, and that its vacancy rate is around 4.5%, lower than the national public housing vacancy rate of 5.3%. NYCHA move-ins increased 52% last year over 2023, to more than 4,000 from less than 2,700.

Source: Gothamist