Photo courtesy of alltheparks/Flickr Creative Commons
New York City’s Housing Preservation and Development department announced in June that the application process for affordable housing lotteries would be updated to make it easier for New Yorkers looking for new homes.
In its announcement, HPD breaks their improvements down into four parts:
- clarifying eligibility guidelines to speed up the application review process,
- introducing new protections for domestic violence survivors,
- limiting options to reject applicants based on credit history and debt, and
- reducing document requirements whenever possible.
All of these reforms go into effect as of July 1, 2018, and apply to all available listings on Housing Connect.
So what do these reforms mean for you?
Regarding eligibility guidelines, HPD’s announcement might be welcomed by freelancers and some contractors: there will no longer be mandatory employment histories for the self-employed. The city also says it will provide examples of income calculations, and be more flexible with changes in household composition between the time someone submits their application and when an agency processes their application.
Domestic violence survivors will also see changes when their application is processed, as every lottery will see that no survivor can be denied due to poor credit, negative debt payment history, or other factors if they are a direct result of domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault, or stalking.
As to credit history and debt, HPD says it will eliminate consideration of an applicant’s debt-to-income ratio. And when it comes to an applicant’s past landlord-tenant actions, marketers will only look at for-cause evictions over the last two years.
Paperwork reductions will mostly be focused on specific buildings that don’t receive tax credits from the city — for those projects, HPD will no longer require reapproval of already qualified applicants to those listings.
Remember — the changes go effect July 1. They’re already a part of the new marketing handbook for marketers and developers, which you can look over as well.
Still got questions? IMPACCT Brooklyn is an HPD Housing Ambassador and is here to answer those questions for you! Just email us at affordablehousing@impacctbk.org and set up an appointment.
