New Homey app helps simplify affordable housing lottery application
NEW YORK (PIX11) — Two men set out on a mission to make applying for affordable housing easier for New Yorkers.
Co-founders Wout Stienaers and Piet Goris launched the app Homey in March to shorten and simplify the process for applying for New York City housing lotteries.
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'Homey is sort of like a translator in between our users and then the housing connect system,' said Stienaers in an interview with PIX11 News.
App users create a profile and answer questions based on those asked by NYC Housing Connect. Homey focuses on asking the questions most needed to assess someone's eligibility for the lottery and eliminates some of the more detailed questions about things like one's assets.
More: Latest News from Around the Tri-State
After a Homey profile is created, a mirror profile is created on NYC Housing Connect using the information from the app. Users will then get alerts for any housing lotteries they're eligible for and can have Homey apply on their behalf.
Applicants can continue to track their submissions and get real-time updates on their lotteries through the Homey app.
How to apply for affordable housing in NYC
'We get all the emails and all the information from Housing Connect, we translate that to our users, and then we translate the input from our users to Housing Connect, and that way it makes it way easier for the users to actually use the system,' Stienaers said.
The co-founder says the idea came from his own experience of trying to navigate NYC Housing Connect to apply for affordable housing. He's now working on adding new features to apply for Section 8 and housing vouchers.
'New Yorkers are busy. Between work, family, and life, they don't have time to constantly monitor new lotteries or deal with confusing paperwork,' said Stienaers.
The Homey app is one of the recent services aimed at making affordable housing easier to obtain for New Yorkers. The NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development has recently launched a new website that makes it easier to find affordable housing rentals after a previous lottery winner has moved out.
Dominique Jack is a digital content producer from Brooklyn with more than five years of experience covering news. She joined PIX11 in 2024. More of her work can be found here.
Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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