The audit zeroed in on application fees at three Manhattan developments: Trinity House, a rental development on the Upper West Side Washington Square Southeast in Greenwich Village, a co-op and York Hill on the Upper East Side, another co-op. “Collecting fees with virtually no chance for an apartment gives applicants false hope and compromises the program’s integrity.” “Mitchell Lama is too important a provider of affordable housing to be undermined by the problems we’ve found,” DiNapoli said.

In a statement, DiNapoli said the audit points to “troubling flaws” with the city’s management of Mitchell-Lama developments. Hundreds of New Yorkers routinely compete for a handful of vacancies at a given complex, but that didn’t stop these developments from continuing to collect $200 application fees. The Mitchell-Lama program provides affordable housing to New Yorkers across the state in the five boroughs, 93 of those developments are presided over by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD), and include roughly 46,500 apartments. Investigators with the comptroller’s office found that “weak oversight” of Mitchell-Lama developments, along with property managers’ failure to return application fees, misled would-be tenants about their odds of landing an apartment and made fees susceptible to misuse. New Yorkers forked over hundreds of thousands in fees to get on affordable housing wait lists with practically no chance of actually scoring one of those coveted homes, according to an audit by state Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli.

New york state mitchell lama housing