New York City’s scarcity of inexpensive land is often cited as an impediment to building more affordable housing, but the comptroller’s office has identified more than 1,000 city-owned vacant lots across the boroughs that have been sitting idle, most for more than 30 years.

An audit to be officially released on Thursday by Comptroller Scott M. Stringer faults the city as being too slow through various mayoral administrations in transferring the land to developers to build housing. The audit said that the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development often delays or abandons development schedules for turning over the properties, and that “even when H.P.D. moved forward with planned development, it did not meet its stated timelines for nearly half of its projects.”

The city-owned properties, mostly clustered in Brooklyn and Queens, are remnants of the thousands of abandoned lots and buildings the city seized after the fiscal crisis of the 1970s. City officials say many of the leftover properties have been hard to develop because they need basic infrastructure such as road access and sewer lines, require too much subsidy or, after Hurricane Sandy, no longer meet resiliency concerns.

Calling the comptroller’s conclusions “false and misleading,” housing officials said that out of the 1,131 vacant properties identified in the audit, about 310 were in flood zones or had other issues that would make development challenging. They also said that an additional 150 properties were better suited for projects other than residential buildings, such as parks and police stations.