NYCHA was my family’s lifeline — but now it needs to go
It pains me to see the New York City Housing Authority, which was a lifeline for my family 54 years ago, become a shadow of its former self.
As an alumnus of John Adams Houses in the South Bronx, it’s disturbing to see how neglected public housing has become over the past 30 years. NYCHA has repeatedly — and apparently, deliberately — failed to protect vulnerable children from lead poisoning, provide adequate heat and hot water during an artic-like winter and, most recently, report contaminated drinking water.
It’s time to abolish NYCHA.
When my parents moved us into the newly opened Adams Houses in 1964, it was after our mother had written Mayor Robert Wagner Jr. about my little brother, who had gotten terribly ill with pneumonia — nearly dying.
For my parents, public housing was a step up from our tiny three-room apartment with shared kitchen and bath in a private house on Bristow Street in The Bronx. Our airy three-bedroom NYCHA apartment on the 21st floor of Building 710 was literally that penthouse in the sky.
The Adams Houses were completed in August 1964, and the monthly per-room rent was $14.99. Our three-bedroom unit probably rented for $75 a month at a time when my Dad’s take-home pay was $50 a week.
The past several months have been particularly distressing as the decrepitude of public housing has been laid bare like an unmasked crone in a children’s fairy tale.
In July, Brevoort House tenants had to fetch water from temporary water stations for nearly two weeks. At Andrew Jackson Houses in The Bronx, tenants endured frequent power outages amid a heat wave late last month.
Truthfully, the last 40 years has seen the slow, agonizing death of public housing. Today, the feds rate half the city’s public housing as low-performing or troubled.
It was considered too patronizing to serve the “deserving poor” or to conduct annual apartment inspections to ensure that units were being properly maintained. Preferences for working-poor families were discarded in favor of housing the desperately poor — and by the late 1980s, homeless families from city shelters were given priority.
No doubt the steady decline in federal government support — beginning in the Reagan era — plus the introduction of portable vouchers and the demolition of crime-ridden, hyper-segregated super-blocks should have been clues about the future of public housing in the city.
Three years ago, City Comptroller Scott Stringer sounded the alarm on the crumbling state of public housing and rapidly escalating heating-system breakdowns. But no one acted.
#AbolishNYCHA is the only rational response.
Outside reports, federal prosecutors and internal documents show that NYCHA management repeatedly lied to HUD monitors, oversight committees and elected officials.
Elected officials such as Councilman Ritchie Torres and Rep. Jose Serrano — whose family’s modest apartment was a showcase unit — who grew up in public housing should demand NYCHA be abolished.
NYCHA once saw its mission as aiding the “deserving poor.” So it certainly helped that my folks were married, and my father was a Korean War vet — and still in the ready reserves. Dad worked making windows as a union carpenter at a shop in Brownsville.
Is there the political will to bring public housing back to its roots?
Perhaps a conservancy calling on the talents of successful former residents such as ex-Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, Goldman Sachs outgoing CEO Lloyd Blankenfein, former schools Chancellor Joel Klein, Whoopie Goldberg, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the musician Nas and Ursula Burns — who as CEO of Xerox became the first African-American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company — can lead a reimagining of public housing in the city.
It’s time for the city to contract out public-housing management to competent, experienced nonprofits and for-profit private-property managers.
A successor entity comprised of real property professionals and experts — not party hacks, campaign hangers-on and donors — should be charted to oversee the private-management companies. The new, smaller agency should have as one of its mandates the repurposing of real-estate assets.
Unused and underdeveloped land, including air rights, must be identified for sale to developers in order to raise the billions needed to fund improvements.
And the once unthinkable — demolition — will have to be on the table. The oldest developments in NYCHA’s portfolio are creakily approaching 80 years old.
Mayor de Blasio needs to recognize the status quo is unsustainable. And if Gov. Cuomo thinks he can do better, he should resume state support of the 21 former state-built and -funded NYCHA developments that were transferred to the federal program almost two decades ago.
Make no mistake: There’s still a need for public housing. Abolishing NYCHA is the only way to save public housing from the wrecking ball of indifference, insufficient funding and incompetence.
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