Mayor Bill de Blasio was bombarded with pointed questions from angry public housing tenants Thursday night as he tried to defend his controversial plan to redevelop and partially privatize a Manhattan housing project.
“Unless there’s a huge infusion of money, we’re all screwed, we’ve got to be honest about this,” de Blasio said, struggling to be heard over vocal protestors during a town hall meeting at the Bayard Rustin Educational Complex on West 18th Street.
“There’s no magical money out there.”
De Blasio was repeatedly interrupted during the more than 90-minute forum, as angry tenants and activists shouted lies and charged the administration was selling out to real estate interests.
“What happened to that money,” said Jacqueline Lara, who lives in the Fulton Houses. “You could fix NYCHA, New York City makes money every single day.”
“You’re lying to us,” she charged.
De Blasio answered: “No.”
“You’re lying,” Lara shot back.
“You know what, don’t accuse someone when you don’t know what they think,” a frustrated de Blasio responded. “Just don’t even bother.”
The blistering exchange came more than an hour into the forum, which Hizzoner began by attempting to parry the anger and mistrust of the New York City Housing Authority by acknowledging the stunning failures of his agency.
“There’s tremendous skepticism, there’s not a lot of trust for any part of the government,” de Blasio admitted. “If you talk about NYCHA itself, it needs endless change.”
“I get the distrust, I get the cynicism,” he said.
That distrust was pointed at City Hall’s controversial proposal to demolish two low-slung buildings and a playground in Chelsea’s Fulton Houses to make room for three new apartment towers that would hold mostly market-rate housing.
Tenants living in the 72 apartments set to be knocked down would be guaranteed housing during the construction and apartments in one of the new buildings afterward, officials say.
Residents would still only pay 30 percent of their income towards rent, which is the current level.
Officials hope the new towers and converting the Fulton Houses and another nearby development, Chelsea-Elliot Houses, to a public-private partnership will raise the more than $300 million needed to cover all the needed repairs at both projects.
But time and again, residents told de Blasio they simply didn’t believe the promises that were being made.
“You’re going to take our park and put a building there,” charged Fulton Houses resident Mary Hicks.
“And create a new park, to be clear,” de Blasio answered.
“That’s what you say, but that’s not going to happen,” the 55-year-old fired back, cutting him off.
City Hall is depending on redevelopment projects like the one slated for Fulton Houses to raise $2 billion for badly needed repairs at public housing developments across the city.
It’s a key part of de Blasio’s much-ballyhooed NYCHA 2.0 plan unveiled in December 2018, which officials hope will pay for as much as $24 billion in much-needed repairs at the authority over the coming decade.
Even in the best-case scenario, that sum would still fall $14 billion short of paying for the $38 billion in maintenance, repairs and upgrades NYCHA needs over the same time span.
And things have not been going according to plan thanks to continued opposition from local politicians, tenants and anti-development activists, the Citizens Budget Commission reported in September.
It found that the proposals for Cooper Park and Wyckoff Gardens in Brooklyn and the La Guardia Houses, Harborview Terrace and Holmes Towers in Manhattan all “appeared stalled.”