'My Whole History, Gone': New Yorkers Speak Out After Duplicate Images Wipe Family Photos From City Housing Portals

Dozens of New York City residents say a recurring software error inside the NYC Housing Connect portal — the city's primary gateway for affordable housing lotteries — has been swapping uploaded identity documents with duplicate images from other applicants' files, effectively freezing their applications and, in some cases, deleting years of carefully gathered paperwork.

The issue matters now because the city is simultaneously managing a record backlog of affordable housing applicants — more than 270,000 households are currently on waiting lists across New York City Housing Authority properties alone, according to NYCHA's most recently published figures — and any disruption to the digital intake system falls hardest on the people who can least afford delays. With rents in the Bronx having climbed past $2,000 a month for a one-bedroom in neighborhoods like Fordham and Mott Haven, a stalled lottery application is not a bureaucratic inconvenience; for many families it represents the difference between stable housing and a shelter placement.

Residents in Jackson Heights, Queens, and the East New York section of Brooklyn described nearly identical experiences when contacted through community organizations that work with low-income applicants. Several people said they uploaded government-issued photo IDs and proof-of-income documents to Housing Connect — administered by the NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development, known as HPD — only to receive automated rejection notices citing missing or illegible documents. When they logged back into their accounts, they found images that were not their own: someone else's pay stub, a stranger's utility bill, or a blurred photo that matched nothing they had submitted.

A Problem Hiding Inside the Portal

The Chhaya Community Development Corporation, a Jackson Heights-based nonprofit that helps South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants navigate housing applications, says staff members have flagged the image-duplication issue to HPD at least twice this spring, most recently in May 2026. The organization runs a housing counseling program out of its 37-11 74th Street office in Queens and works with several hundred active housing lottery applicants each year. Staff there began noticing a pattern in March, when multiple clients reported getting rejection notices despite having their document uploads confirmed by the portal's own status screen.

Make the Road New York, which operates out of offices in Bushwick and Staten Island and represents tens of thousands of immigrant families, has also been fielding complaints. Housing navigators at the organization say the affected applicants are disproportionately people who lack easy access to backup documentation — those whose original birth certificates or immigration records are difficult to replace and who submitted digital scans as their only copy.

HPD's Housing Connect system was relaunched with updated software in late 2023 as part of the Adams administration's effort to modernize the lottery intake process. At the time, the city described the redesign as a way to reduce processing times and improve accessibility for applicants with limited English proficiency. The portal is currently used to manage applications for every affordable housing development built under the city's Mandatory Inclusionary Housing program.

What Residents Are Being Told — and What to Do

Community advocates say HPD's customer service line, reachable at 212-863-8494, has been directing affected applicants to simply re-upload their documents and resubmit. But that workaround does not restore original submission timestamps, which matter because lottery placements are partly determined by application date. Applicants who resubmit after a duplication error could lose their position in a queue they waited months to reach.

For anyone currently using Housing Connect, advocates at Chhaya recommend keeping a timestamped email confirmation for every document upload and taking a screenshot of the portal's status page immediately after submission. Make the Road New York is advising clients to follow up with a written email to HPD's Office of Housing Access and Stability within 48 hours of any upload, creating a paper trail outside the portal itself.

HPD had not responded to a request for comment submitted Thursday morning. The agency's next public community board presentation on housing connect system performance is scheduled for a Brooklyn Community Board 5 meeting in East New York later this month.