Dozens of senior apartments in NYC left vacant amid housing crisis, NYC comptroller finds

Dozens of apartments that are reserved for seniors and managed by New York City have been left vacant for years amid a citywide housing crisis, New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli revealed in an audit released Wednesday.

DiNapoli found that at least 71 senior apartments controlled by the city have sat empty — some of them for an average of nearly three years — as New Yorkers in search of homes struggle to find housing they can afford.

The comptroller also pointed to flaws within the process for awarding the coveted senior units and found applicants for apartments at developments in Queens, the Bronx and Brooklyn were either moved down a waiting list when they shouldn’t have or rejected for “invalid reasons.”

“New York City’s affordable housing agencies need to make sure they are doing everything they can to place vulnerable seniors into available housing,” DiNapoli said in a written statement. “Unfortunately, the audit found that there is more they can do to make sure those next in line are not passed over and that available apartments don’t sit vacant.”

The state comptroller’s findings come as Mayor Adams’ continues to wrestle with how to care for the more than 75,000 migrants who’ve come to the city since last April, putting an unprecedented strain on the city’s homeless shelter system and contributing to an already dire shortage of affordable housing.

For months, Adams has come under fire for how he’s managed the crisis with critics saying he hasn’t done enough to provide affordable housing, which would alleviate some of the burden felt in the city’s shelter system. City Council members attacked him in May for doing too little when it comes to getting landlords to rent out long-vacant, so-called “warehoused” apartments and for allowing thousands of supportive housing units to sit vacant.

The mayor, to at least some degree, appears to have heeded those calls.

The new budget he and the City Council recently agreed on sets aside $4 billion in the next fiscal year for affordable housing and includes the restoration of $32.9 million in funding for the New York City Housing Authority’s vacant-unit readiness program — money that had been cut from Adams’ previous executive budget proposal.

But DiNapoli’s report suggests there’s more work to be done.

In the audit, which covered January 2014 to September 2022, DiNapoli and his team found that programs overseen by two city agencies — the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and the Housing Development Corporation — failed to fill vacancies in a timely manner and meet their own program requirements.

At the HANAC Corona Senior Residence in Queens, six apartments sat empty for an average of almost three years. Two of those were fully-furnished flats intended for the homeless.

At Woodlawn Senior Living in the Bronx, only 15 of 80 senior apartments were assigned as of July 2022 — even though they’d become available seven months before and were accompanied by a waiting list of more than 12,000 potential tenants. While 24 of those apartments were reserved for the homeless, only 11 were leased as of June 2022.

In some instances, waiting lists for units in senior housing complexes also “contained significant inaccuracies,” according to the audit.

At the 71-unit Bensonhurst Housing for the Elderly in Brooklyn, the comptroller found at least two applicants were bypassed by tenants who were lower down on the waiting list. Those two tenants who’d missed out were on the waiting list at the Bensonhurst complex since 2014. A similar situation unfolded at Victory Plaza in Manhattan, where, according to the audit, two seniors who got apartments bypassed other applicants who should have taken priority.

To remedy the situation, DiNapoli recommended that the Department of Housing Preservation and Development review vacancy reports and coordinate with building managers “to identify and promptly fill vacant apartments.” He also recommended that the city’s Housing Development Corporation “review waiting lists and increase oversight … to ensure applicants are selected in the correct order.”

A spokesperson for Mayor Adams did not immediately respond when asked to comment on the audit, but in a response included in the report, HPD Commissioner Adolfo Carrion and HDC President Eric Enderlin wrote that prior to the release of DiNapoli’s findings their agencies “had begun enhancements … to provide more expeditious service.”

“Almost all recommendations that the [comptroller] has proposed in this audit report were already underway at HPD and HDC if they were within our control to implement,” they added.