Some NYC Housing Lottery Winners Find Small, Pricey Units With Limits

What happened

Curbed reported on October 15, 2026 that some New Yorkers who win rent-stabilized apartments through the city's affordable-housing lottery end up unhappy. Their complaints include tiny units, amenities they cannot use, and rents close to market rate. The story focuses on middle-income applicants, typically around 130 percent of area median income (AMI).

Miguel Castro won a rent-stabilized studio at 25 Water Street, a new 1,300-unit office-to-residential conversion in the Financial District. His rent is $2,250 a month plus $150 in amenity fees. Curbed puts a market-rate studio nearby at around $4,300. He left a lottery one-bedroom in Jamaica, Queens to move there. He now describes the studio as the smallest he has lived in, with thin, uninsulated walls, little light or ventilation, and a view into a shared courtyard. Elijah DuPonty toured a lottery one-bedroom on Tompkins Avenue in Bedford-Stuyvesant. It was smaller than his Upper West Side apartment and cost nearly $200 more than the $2,820 he paid at market rate. He withdrew near the end of the process.

Tanoopa, who had applied to lotteries since 1999, was picked in June 2025 for a 475-square-foot alcove studio at the Dupont in Greenpoint for roughly $3,100 a month, about half her take-home pay. She lost her job three months into the lease. She says management told her she could not break the lease and would owe rent until the unit was re-rented, but that it could not show the apartment while she lived there. She says she stayed until the lease ended. At the Eagle + West complex in Greenpoint, affordable units are clustered at 27 Eagle Street. A lottery winner there, who pays around $1,800 for a studio, learned late in the process that the pools and fitness center advertised in the listing are not open to 27 Eagle tenants. Affordable tenants at 227 West, another tower in the complex, can use them.

Curbed cites a 2020 analysis finding that units at the 30 percent AMI tier draw floods of applications, while upper tiers up to 130 percent AMI have far fewer applicants and an acceptance rate six times higher. Nate Bliss, a former executive director for economic development under the Adams administration, told Curbed that rents reflect what makes each project work financially under various city, state and federal programs. He called the application process "invasive," "cumbersome" and "time-consuming."