Here’s an item for the to-do list of Lisa Zornberg, the newly appointed counsel to Mayor Adams: Urge your boss to drop all official opposition and swiftly settle, a lawsuit challenging the fundamentally unfair lottery system by which the city allocates subsidized apartments.
For a simple example of how the lottery currently discriminates, look at the 112 units of new apartments going up atat 750 East 134th Street in the Port Morris area of the South Bronx. The city’s Housing Connect website, where people can apply until September 12, lists some juicy deals: 21 one-bedroom units will rent for $969 a month, available to couples making between roughly $36,000 and $56,000 a year. Seven studios will be open to solo applicants with income between $29,280 and $49,450.
But New York’s lottery, by setting aside half of the units for people already living on the right side of the Community Board line, all but ensures that the vast majority of low-income New Yorkers seeking shelter — who, by definition, already meet the lottery’s low-income guidelines — get shut out of the Willow and the racial profile of the South Bronx will see minimal change.
The deals were cut, and the Koch, Bloomberg, and de Blasio administrations are now gone, but what remains is a policy that measurably contributes to keeping New York’s neighborhoods racially segregated in violation of the federal Fair Housing Act and the city’s own Human Rights Law. The solution is simple: Equalize future lotteries so that all qualified low-income applicants get equal access to available subsidized apartments.