Division of Housing and Community Renewal

Tenant Selection Practices at Rochdale Village (Follow-Up Report)

Many of New York’s publicly financed housing developments are owned by private housing companies, such as Rochdale Village, Inc., which owns 5,860 cooperative apartments in Queens. In audit 2007-S-92, we examined Rochdale’s tenant selection practices and found that many of the practices did not comply with requirements. For example, some tenants were selected out of order and allowed to bypass others on the waiting list, some of the selected tenants were not even on the waiting list, some tenants were living in apartments without the proper authorization, and some tenants were living rent-free in apartments reported as vacant. We also determined that DHCR was not effectively monitoring Rochdale’s waiting lists and tenant selection practices to ensure that apartments were allocated in a fair and equitable manner. We recommended that DHCR strengthen its oversight, and when we followed up on these matters with DHCR officials, we found that they had made significant progress in implementing our recommendations.

For a complete copy of Report 2009-F-22 click here.
For a copy of the 90-day response click here.