New York City’s housing watchdogs are running out of patience with the city’s affordable-housing portal, and so is the agency that runs it. Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Dina Levy told the City Council at a preliminary budget hearing Tuesday that the Housing Connect system is in line for a major reset, and that the city is prepared to scrap it altogether if tweaks keep falling flat. Her remarks landed as applicants, landlords and advocates say approvals and lease-ups are dragging on for months longer than they should.
Levy said the agency plans to “revamp both our housing lottery and our homeless placement systems” and added that “if necessary, we will migrate to a more efficient and nimble system,” according to The Real Deal. She did not name a replacement platform but said HPD is weighing recommendations from the administration’s interagency SPEED task force. Levy also used the hearing to highlight staffing levels and budget pressures as part of her case that the city needs more than just cosmetic fixes.
Long waits and the numbers
HPD’s own performance numbers show how clogged the pipeline has become. The city’s Mayor’s Management Report puts the median wait at about 142 days to approve a lottery applicant in fiscal 2025 and roughly 235 days to lease up homeless set-aside units. Those delays are piling up even as the city reports that Housing Connect helped more than 10,000 households land affordable apartments and HPD moved roughly 4,600 households out of shelters last year. Levy has pointed to those metrics as proof that patchwork adjustments are not enough to plow through the current backlog.
Temporary fixes are already under way
While HPD studies more dramatic options, the agency has been rolling out interim changes meant to shave time off the process. In testimony posted by HPD, staff described a temporary policy that lets some re-rentals be marketed outside the Housing Connect portal and noted that the department relaxed certain paperwork requirements last year to push approvals along faster. HPD’s April 2025 marketing-handbook revisions are another piece of that effort, aimed at cutting red tape and speeding lease-ups while the agency weighs deeper technical and operational changes.
Tech is part of the bottleneck
Oversight reviews and audits have repeatedly pointed a finger at the software itself. A recent Comptroller analysis tracing Housing Connect’s rollout and subsequent upgrades notes that the city hired a vendor to rebuild the portal as Housing Connect 2.0 and later signed add-on contracts, yet key features remain underdeveloped because of procurement limits and other constraints. That history has fueled arguments from some officials that a full replacement could be worth the up-front price if it shaves months off approvals and move-ins. Skeptics counter that swapping systems would still require a careful procurement process and meticulous data migration, which could slow things down before they get better.
What to watch next
The mayor’s interagency SPEED task force was set up to hunt for procedural fixes and recommend changes that could reshape how HPD markets and leases subsidized apartments, with local coverage casting it as a bid to strip red tape out of the housing pipeline. Reporting from NBC New York notes that City Hall expects the task force to surface near-term steps to boost production and lease-up speed. If those recommendations include a major systems overhaul, HPD will have to navigate procurement timelines, privacy protections for applicant data, and coordination with building owners and voucher programs, any of which could stretch the schedule for a full replacement.
For now, HPD says it will keep piloting incremental fixes while it studies a larger rebuild, so applicants are still being told to keep Housing Connect profiles up to date and respond quickly to document requests. Any overhaul that actually delivers faster move-ins will likely have to pair new software with staffing and process changes; otherwise a shiny new portal risks becoming just another layer in a system that already moves at a crawl.
