Apartments for homeless families sit empty for months. NYC has a new plan to change that.

New York City set out to address its growing homelessness crisis seven years ago by requiring large housing developers to reserve thousands of new apartments for people living in shelters.

The city’s shelter population has only grown since then. But so has the time it takes to fill these apartments set aside for homeless New Yorkers — reaching a median eight months last fiscal year, according to city data.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Wednesday will unveil a plan meant to streamline the leasing process to move some families and individuals from shelters to housing much faster. The city’s housing and homeless services agencies will test a new pipeline between developers and shelter providers that eliminates many of the bureaucratic obstacles that currently prolong the process, officials told Gothamist.

The initiative is set to begin this fall and comes as the city faces a severe housing shortage, with more than 83,000 New Yorkers sleeping in homeless shelters every night and apartments reserved for them sitting empty.

“New Yorkers living in shelter feel the consequences of housing delays more than anyone else,” Mamdani told Gothamist in a written statement. “Every month a vacant affordable apartment sits tied up in bureaucracy is another month a family remains without permanent housing.”

The pilot program, known as Making Accelerated Transitions to Coordinated Housing, or MATCH, is part of a broader set of housing reforms proposed by a task force Mamdani created on his first day in office. The initiative will allow developers to work directly with shelter providers to find tenants for their homeless set-aside units, rather than requiring city agencies to identify available units, refer potential renters and relay the information between the two parties.

“It’s taking the middleman out of the equation,” said Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Dina Levy.

Levy said the city will test the changes in up to 10 new developments and then assess the results to ensure that developers and marketing agents aren’t “cherry-picking” whom they consider the most desirable tenants.

“We are going to make sure that is not what happens,” Levy said. “That we haven’t sacrificed fairness.”

The new plan marks the latest evolution of the city’s homeless set-aside program, which was approved by the City Council in late 2019. About 62,000 people stayed in Department of Homeless Services shelters at the time. The Council and then-Mayor Bill de Blasio negotiated a plan to require new apartment buildings that have more than 40 units and receive government financing or tax breaks to reserve at least 15% of units for people living in homeless shelters.

More than 3,700 households moved from Department of Homeless Services shelters last fiscal year into newly constructed units under the program, according to the most recent Mayor’s Management Report, a scorecard of city agency performance.

But the median amount of time it took to move from shelter to the units ballooned to nearly eight months — two months longer than in 2024 and more than double the time in 2021, city data shows.

Carlina Rivera, a former city councilmember who now leads a lobbying group for affordable housing developers and owners, said the pilot program will eliminate bureaucratic delays and allow landlords to collect rent on units otherwise sitting empty.

“We need that efficiency,” said Rivera, president of the New York State Association For Affordable Housing, which had advocated for changes. “We need to speed up this process now more than ever.”

The city’s housing agency last year streamlined the lengthy process for re-renting vacant affordable apartments through the city’s housing lottery after facing criticism from property owners and tenants.

But despite an affordability crisis, the city has struggled to renovate and fill thousands of vacant public housing units, as well as thousands of units in supportive housing developments designed for formerly homeless New Yorkers with special needs.

Homeless New Yorkers now spend more than a year in shelters after they first move in, according to city data. Last year, single men stayed in shelters for an average of 378 days, while families with children remained in a shelter for 372 days.

Mamdani will also announce a new task force to examine the supportive housing vacancy problem, a City Hall spokesperson said.