A straightforward description of New York City’s affordable-housing lottery system sounds like one of Ronald Reagan’s Soviet jokes.
The program, which distributes below-market housing to randomly selected New Yorkers, received almost 6 million applications last year for just 10,000 available units — a process so unlikely to yield an apartment that it seems more like a Powerball drawing than a real policy.
While New York’s bureaucracy administers the housing Hunger Games, Dallas’s skyline is dotted with cranes.
Amid a surge in jobs and residents, Dallas has kept rents affordable and quietly cemented its status as a premier destination for ambitious Americans.
The contrast could not be starker — or more instructive.
With greater Dallas on track to surpass the tristate area in economic might by the turn of the century, it’s up to Gotham to deregulate its housing market if it wants to remain the nation’s leading city.