An affordable housing lottery just opened at 80 Ainslie Street in Williamsburg, and to qualify for the largest apartments you are allowed to earn up to $238,160 a year. That is the income ceiling, not the floor. In a city where the typical household brings home around $84,000, the word “affordable” is doing some very heavy lifting here.
The building is a seven-story, 16-unit project designed by Syndicate Architecture and developed by Parkview Management, according to New York YIMBY. Five of those 16 units are going through the lottery, all set aside for households at 130 percent of the area median income (AMI). The application deadline is June 26, 2026.
Per YIMBY’s June 6 listing, two one-bedrooms rent for $2,320 a month, open to households earning between $85,509 and $198,510. Three two-bedrooms rent for $2,795 a month, open to households earning between $103,818 and $238,160. To even be eligible for the cheapest unit, a one-person household has to clear roughly $85,000 in income. That is the entry price, before you have paid a dime of the $2,320 rent.
A $238,160 salary counts as needing affordable housing because of AMI, the number every NYC housing lottery is built on. AMI is set each year by the federal government (HUD), and it is calculated for the entire New York metro region, not for the five boroughs. As City Limits laid out, HUD applies an upward “high housing cost adjustment” that pushes the official income baseline far above what New Yorkers actually earn. AMNY reported that the figure is inflated further because HUD includes wealthy suburban counties like Putnam and Westchester in the same region as the five boroughs, landing on a 100 percent AMI for a family of four of $155,300, even though the real median household income runs about $76,912 in Brooklyn and roughly $46,838 in the Bronx.
The New York State Comptroller puts Brooklyn’s median household income at $80,263 in the 2024 Census data. So the $238,160 you are permitted to earn and still qualify for an “affordable” two-bedroom at 80 Ainslie is roughly three times what the median Brooklyn household actually makes. The Community Service Society has called AMI “the most used, and probably the most hated, metric for discussing housing affordability,” and David R. Jones, the group’s president, told AMNY the formula keeps “perpetuating deep racial and economic inequalities” while “failing to serve those most in need.”
This is not 80 Ainslie’s first lottery. Back in 2019, Greenpointers reported a lottery for the exact same five units: two one-bedrooms at $2,320 a month and three two-bedrooms, with a deadline that April. Same address, same units, same one-bedroom rent of $2,320. What changed is the income range. In 2019 the one-bedrooms were open to households earning $79,543 to $108,550, and the two-bedrooms to households earning $95,829 to $135,590. Seven years later the rent on the one-bedroom has not moved, but the income ceiling on the two-bedroom has climbed from $135,590 to $238,160. The apartment is the same. The salary you are allowed to have walking into it went up by more than $100,000.
The second lottery exists at all because the building spent years going nowhere. New York YIMBY reported in May 2025 that 80 Ainslie was stalled in Williamsburg, with permits originally filed back in June 2015 and an initial completion target of summer 2018 that came and went while construction sat idle. The 2019 lottery ran for a building that was not finished, and the project drifted for years before resurfacing in 2026 with a fresh set of income numbers attached.
None of this means the lottery is a scam, and none of it means you should skip it. The 130 percent AMI tier is genuinely rarer than the lower-income bands most NYC lotteries fill, and a rent-regulated two-bedroom in Williamsburg at $2,795 is a real deal against the open market. “Affordable housing” in New York is a legal income bracket pinned to a federal formula, not a promise that the apartment is cheap, and at 80 Ainslie that bracket now reaches well into six figures.
The application window closes June 26, 2026. If your household income lands inside those ranges, you can search the listing and apply directly on the city’s official portal at NYC Housing Connect, where each open lottery posts its exact rents, income bands, and asset limits before you submit. Read the income range for your household size carefully, because at this building it is the income floor, not the rent, that screens most New Yorkers out.
Featured image: Acroterion / CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons
