Thousands of apartments are sitting vacant in the city's public housing system, according to a new report.

A quarterly report released this month by the federal monitor overseeing NYCHA shows nearly 5,000 NYCHA apartments are empty, despite a waiting list for public housing that exceeded 274,000 families as of January 2023.

While NYCHA in 2022 created a special team to turn vacant apartments over for new tenants more quickly, the report says the change was "not successful."

Delegating turnover responsibilities away from individual NYCHA developments "resulted in confusion and frustration from development staff," according to the report.

"In some cases, development management would initiate work orders to advance the turnover of these apartments only to have [the special team] come in to take control of an apartment and then have it sit vacant with no work occurring for months," the report said.

The report comes after a 2019 settlement with the Department of Justice demanded NYCHA fix decades of mismanagement and neglect.

In a statement provided to NY1, NYCHA press secretary Michael Horgan said the agency "must ensure that every vacant unit that is turned over has been tested and abated for environmental hazards, such as lead and asbestos, which has added time to the turnover process."

"A temporary pause on many turnovers had been implemented in preparation for the new, more stringent lead testing standard, and to hold vacant apartments as space for temporary moves related to environmental work," Horgan said. "We have updated this policy to ensure that an appropriate number of units are held vacant for these purposes."

NYCHA saw a 40% improvement in the total number of vacant apartment move-ins it recorded from 2022 to 2023, the agency said.

Editor's note: A previous version of this story incorrectly identified the entity that created the special team.