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.

With a little help from family, Mr. Thomas, who’s been working as a teacher in a Manhattan private school, had saved just enough to buy it outright: $14,000 cash. His monthly maintenance is a whopping $295.

For Virginia Woolf, creative freedom arrived when her aunt, out for some fresh air in Bombay, fell off a horse and left her niece an annual income “forever,” as Woolf writes with gratitude in “A Room of One’s Own.” For Matthew Thomas, that precious freedom arrived when the faceless bureaucracy of New York’s Mitchell-Lama Housing Program churned out his name, guaranteeing him not just any room of his own, but a miraculously inexpensive room he could have, if he liked, forever. What some of his East Side neighbors might pay for a two-week rental in Southampton, he paid for a lifetime’s worth of liberation.

“I feel less whipped by the demon of fear that I have to get my novel done overnight in order to make life possible,” said Mr. Thomas, surrounded by the last of the boxes of the books he’d brought to the studio on 88th Street between Second and Third Avenues.