Long Island public housing has nation's longest wait times

Applicants for public housing on Long Island have some of the longest wait times in the country, a Newsday analysis found, underscoring the housing crisis in one of the wealthiest regions in America.

People wait an average of eight years for a subsidized apartment through the Town of Hempstead Housing Authority, which is the longest among large public housing authorities, or those with at least 1,250 units as classified by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Hempstead's wait time is more than triple the national average of its large counterparts. HUD had found the town housing authority — with approximately 1,300 units across 14 complexes — ran an illegal waitlist that prioritized elderly white residents over persons of color and people with disabilities.

Long wait times extend beyond Long Island’s largest public housing provider to housing authorities of all sizes, including those that haven’t been accused of discriminatory practices, but are also contending with a housing crunch in the wealthy region.

Newsday also found Long Beach is in the top 10 for longest average wait times in the nation among "medium-sized" housing authorities, those with 250 to 1,249 units.

Applicants there are waiting more than eight years to get into a unit, slightly longer than those in Hempstead. Those who moved into a unit have stayed an average of 15 years, federal data shows.

Three other authorities in the medium category — Oyster Bay, at 72 months; Freeport, 63 months; and Hempstead Village, 30 months — all hold waitlist times longer than the national average of 23 months.

Then there is the Town of Huntington Housing Authority, which has an average 18-year wait time, by far tops the nation. With 40 units, it is classified by HUD as a "very small" public housing authority.

Nearly all of these authorities have their waitlists closed and some have websites that provide little or no information about their application process or are completely broken.

"We are not building enough affordable housing and that would be a major explanation about why these towns on Long Island have much longer wait times than the national average," said Ian Wilder, executive director of Long Island Housing Services. 

 Even if the wait times are uniformly long, the dynamics between Long Island housing authorities of different sizes greatly vary.

In Huntington, for example, the authority’s 40 units are designed for families and are coveted in a town in which about only 10,300 people live below the poverty line, or 5% of the town’s population. Those who make it in stay an average of nearly 14 years, greatly limiting turnover.

Huntington Housing Authority executive director Steven Nakano did not respond to a request for comment.

State Sen. Siela Bynoe (D-Westbury) ran Huntington's housing authority for 12 years before she entered the State Legislature. She said the fact that long wait times are consistent across Island housing authorities of all sizes and even between the ones following federal regulations and ones accused of discrimination says a lot about the region's housing crisis.

"That's the common denominator amongst all of those housing authorities," Bynoe said. "Even when they're managing their waiting list in compliance with fair housing rules — there's just not enough inventory."

'Scant information'

As Newsday reported last month, HUD alleged the Town of Hempstead Housing Authority leveraged an illegal point system to organize its waitlist. The system, HUD had found in December 2024, benefited elderly and white applicants over Black and Hispanic applicants and those working-age with a disability.

HUD said Hempstead lacked "basic information" for the public on its waitlist terms and application process.

"The scant information," HUD said, "is unusual for a housing authority its size ..."

HUD, following disclosure by Newsday, withdrew its findings in a highly unusual move.

The federal agency had said the town authority’s point system benefited white residents over non-white applicants. Just over half of tenants are people of color in the Town of Hempstead Housing Authority's units, but two-thirds of the population in the town that is under the poverty line are people of color.

The only housing authority with a more severe disparity in racial demographics is in Oyster Bay. While half the town’s residents below the poverty line are people of color, only a quarter of the tenants are people of color.

The Town of Oyster Bay, separate from its public housing authority, recently settled a case over alleged discriminatory practices. The U.S. Justice Department sued the town in 2014, alleging that both programs — one for seniors and another for new homebuyers — violated the Fair Housing Act. The state filed its own lawsuit a year later.

"The Town is predominantly white, and very few African American residents are eligible for these housing programs," DOJ lawyers said at the time.

The housing authority was not a party to the case or the settlement.

Town of Oyster Bay Housing Authority executive director Donald MacKenzie did not respond to a request for comment.

Wait time analysis

For its wait time analysis Newsday looked exclusively at traditional public housing units and not units through "Section 8" housing choice vouchers — which account for the bulk of Long Island's subsidized housing.

The next closest average wait list time to Town of Hempstead’s is for City of Los Angeles public housing, at seven years. L.A.’s housing authority has 5,900 traditional public housing units.

At the New York City Housing Authority, the largest public housing authority in the nation, with 144,000 units, waitlist time is about 1½ years.

Other large housing authorities in New York saw similar average wait times for applicants, including two years in Rochester and 1½ years in Buffalo.

Town of Hempstead Housing Authority officials have denied the discrimination claims that HUD has since rescinded.

But Hempstead has acknowledged the crunch for its housing when it was applying to HUD to designate most of its public housing as senior-only in 2025.

"The lack of affordable housing for the elderly in and throughout the Town of Hempstead and surrounding Nassau County has reached crisis levels," the housing authority said.

Wilder, a civil rights attorney, said towns and the housing authorities should be taking note of when waitlists are relatively long.

"Why do we have these numbers? What effect does these numbers have? Is it hurting us? And what do we need to do in order to get to a place that keeps our economy going?" Wilder said. "It would be great if these towns were asking these questions."