New York City has more than 4,500 newly completed affordable housing units that sat vacant for a median of 439 days before tenants moved in, according to a report released Friday by Enterprise Community Partners. People are sleeping in shelters tonight while finished apartments collect dust.

The nonprofit, which helps finance and build affordable developments, drew that figure from its portfolio of more than 50 New York City projects included among 800-plus nationwide. By comparison, the national median leasing timeline across that same portfolio of more than 800 projects was 156 days. New York’s median is nearly three times that number. The fastest local leasing process clocked in around eight and a half months. The slowest ran past two years.

Three times the national figure. For units that are built. Paid for. Ready.

The City first reported on the findings ahead of Friday’s release. Enterprise’s analysis covered more than 4,500 apartments spread across the five boroughs, drawing on data collected in 2026 from properties already completed and waiting on tenants.

Developers and operators who spoke with Enterprise described the same wall of obstacles: approval backlogs, layered eligibility reviews, and processing delays at multiple agencies, each one tacking on weeks before a family can walk through the door.

Patrick Boyle, senior policy director at Enterprise, didn’t dress it up. “Broadly speaking, let affordable housing owners just fill these buildings with people in need,” Boyle said. “It’s important to be sure the process runs fairly so people have sort of an equal chance at being placed, but when you layer in too much process, you’re hurting the people that you’re trying to help.”

That’s a real person waiting, not a case file.

Ayah is 29. She spent three years in a city shelter with her 5-year-old son after leaving an abusive marriage, and it still took her roughly two years to get her current apartment in Jamaica, Queens. She asked that her last name be withheld for her safety.

“Even though I’m so grateful to be in my own space, it just felt like I had to jump through so many hoops and it just felt so exhausting and absolutely humiliating,” Ayah said. “The entire experience was extremely grueling.”

Her son spent most of his early childhood in a shelter while the system processed them.

Much of the pressure falls on the Department of Housing Preservation and Development, the city agency that manages the pipeline for approving tenants into income-restricted units. HPD’s review process requires income certification, household eligibility screenings, and coordination with developers and sometimes other city agencies, all of which can stack into months-long delays. Housing advocates and property operators have been pushing HPD to cut that timeline for years.

It’s not just a humanitarian problem. Vacant units hurt the financial returns that investors and lenders count on when they help fund affordable construction. When those returns look shaky, it’s harder to get the next project off the ground. The vacancy problem can loop back into whether new affordable housing gets built at all.

The April 11 report recommends that the city adopt standardized timelines, allow more flexibility for building owners to fill units without waiting on multiple simultaneous approval layers, and push for broader coordination across agencies that touch the leasing process.

A mayoral spokesperson didn’t commit to specific reforms but left the door open. “All options are on the table as we review these recommendations and work to get New Yorkers into available affordable housing units as quickly as possible,” a mayoral spokesperson said.

Already, Enterprise says it’s working with 16,000 voucher holders at risk of losing rental assistance, a separate but related pressure point in the city’s housing crunch. Broadly, the report argues the city can’t afford to treat bureaucratic process as a neutral factor when the cost of that process is measured in shelter nights and years lost.

The 2026 report covers 11 specific metrics across 29 surveyed properties in New York, and 10 of those metrics showed New York performing worse than the national benchmark. Only 5 fell within acceptable range.

HPD has not yet responded to a request for comment on whether it plans to adopt any of the report’s recommendations.