One of the city’s most notable apartment complexes built to house middle-class New Yorkers is now open for applicants who want to be part of an online housing lottery. A new agreement between New York City and Blackstone Group will keep 5,000 units of Stuyvesant Town-Peter Cooper Village affordable for the next 20 years.
The lottery application process opened March 1 and runs through March 31. Through a random draw, 15,000 applicants will be selected from the lottery and placed on a waiting list for the designated units. It’s unclear how many of the designated units would be available after the wait list is established, but Stuy Town contains 11,250 apartment units on the East Side between 14th Street up to 23rd Street along the FDR Drive, 1st Avenue and Avenue C.
The agreement comes just three months after Blackstone bought the massive apartment complex for $5.3 billion and received $144 million subsidy from the city in exchange for keeping affordable units at the massive complex.
“The Stuyvesant Town lottery is the result of the largest preservation deal in New York City history,” City Councilman Dan Garodnick said in a statement. “This community will continue to be home to middle-class people, and all qualified New Yorkers should strongly consider taking advantage of this opportunity.”
Current residents of Stuy Town will not be given preference, as the city is aiming to open affordable housing opportunities to all New Yorkers. Here’s a link to all qualification requirements. Some of the rents for the affordable units will be:
- Studio units at $1,210 for applicants earning between $36,300 and $48,400 per year
- Two-bedroom units at $3,205 for earners between $96,150 and $142,395 per year
- Three-bedroom units at $1,796 for income earners between $53,880 and $80,160
- Three-bedrooms at $3,704 for households earning between $111,120 and $165,330
- Five-bedroom units will rent at $4,560 for families making $136,800 to $153,945 annually
The agreement runs through 2035, and will prompt Blackstone to place units into the affordable housing category when the number of deregulated apartments at or above market rates falls below 5,000 units. Once the lottery is complete and the waiting list is established after March 31, 2016, the waiting list will be in place for two years. After that, the list will be scrapped as a new lottery is opened to allow New Yorkers to again apply.
With its history of housing New York’s working and middle-class residents since being built after World War II, Stuy Town is home to about 30,000 residents.
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