A 32-year-old "aspiring novelist" finally has a room of his own. He won some weird housing lottery he had applied for years earlier, for people whose income was below $49,625. "I'm persisting in this weird feeling that this will all be taken away from me by some Kafkaesque bureaucratic oversight," he tells the NYT. Yeah, but what's his monthly maintenance?

Oh. $295.

Fortunately for Mr. Thomas, his mother was flipping through his mail last August and noticed the envelope, which could easily have been mistaken for junk. It contained an equally flimsy letter, possibly mimeographed, informing Mr. Thomas that he was the proud winner of a relatively obscure government-subsidized housing lottery to which he had applied four years earlier. The letter from Maxwell-Kates, which manages the building, didn't exactly sound like Ed McMahon celebrating the sweepstakes — it warned him he'd have to be approved, file forms and so on — but Mr. Thomas knew he was on the brink of victory. Sure enough, by December, he was the proud owner of a studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. [NYT]

So that you will never miss an opportunity like this again, here is a link to the NYC Affordable Housing Resource Center, which includes information on all the lotteries. Not afraid to be servicey!