Many groups have now jumped on the cause of saving public housing in New York City. But few dare to stand up to Mayor de Blasio, the man primarily responsible for strong-arming tenants into becoming part of Rental Assistance Demonstration, the federal government program that moves public housing into private management.
Rental Assistance Demonstration, or RAD, is an Orwellian name given to an Obama administration housing program that turns public housing into one of those nightmarish “public-private partnerships.” RAD can lead to higher rents, an increased incidence of landlord harassment and upward spikes in evictions.
In New York, the settlement agreement negotiated by U.S. Attorney Geoffrey Berman allows NYCHA to deny the protection of a federal monitor to public housing residents who undergo RAD conversion.
De Blasio claims that RAD is the only way to save NYCHA, which faces a capital shortfall estimated to be $32 billion, and growing. We at Fight For NYCHA disagree. We have proposed a People’s Budget, a package of ideas for legislation that will raise taxes on the rich to fully fund public housing and forge a new government policy based on justice and dignity.
We say privatization is a smoke-screen. Large-scale, real-estate portfolio managers can’t make money without generous government tax breaks, like 421-a or RAD. Moreover, RAD leases are worded in such a way to eliminate city responsibility for tenants’ injuries resulting from NYCHA’s uninhabitable conditions.
The new RAD lease contains a provision that forces tenants to accept their apartments “as is.” Since NYCHA residents have been harmed by the conditions of their apartments, this attempt at making tenants sign away NYCHA’s responsibility is unconscionable.
It’s unsettling that the mayor continues to convert public housing under RAD, despite the dangers to tenants, particularly since Rep. Nydia Velazquez has indicated that she wants the city and state to fund NYCHA before her funding bill can pass through Congress.
To stop RAD, we have organized tenant meetings and political education workshops, held town halls, filed at least one lawsuit and barged into meetings of the mayor’s NYCHA working group, which is violating the Open Meetings Law.
We won’t stop. Public housing residents have been forced to live in uninhabitable apartments with non-working elevators, broken boilers, leaks, toxic mold, and lead in drinking water and in household paint. The federal investigation extracted pennies on the dollar from the city in a measly settlement. The mayor now threatens to put at least one-third of NYCHA (62,000 apartments) into the hands of private landlords.
We believe that the government deliberately neglected NYCHA as a pretext for privatization. Conveniently, now comes the mayor, saying essentially that tenants will only get repairs if and only if they submit to RAD.
Public housing residents know how bleak things are, and many fear what RAD could bring. But because of their vulnerability, tenants also fear a backlash for speaking up. Even though I am not a NYCHA tenant, I can attest to the tactics that powerholders use against activists.
Our resolve has to be stronger than politicians’ vengefulness.
At a recent City Council public housing committee hearing, legislators complained about heat outages in their districts, but refused to allocate the extra funding needed to permanently repair heating systems. NYCHA’s culture of unaccountability absolutely begins with the feds, but it is also true that the road to betrayal also runs through City Hall.
After Fight For NYCHA was critical of Council Speaker Corey Johnson for neglecting public housing in his district, a nonprofit, Community Voices Heard, bused people to a church in central Brooklyn, where Johnson professed his support for public housing. That’s only one among many groups that are failing to staunchly oppose putting public housing into private managers’ hands.
We, the poor, are organizing. We believe that public housing must remain public, with taxpayer funding needed to stay safe and habitable. We are speaking our truth, and we urge New Yorkers of goodwill to join us.
Flores is a member of Fight For NYCHA.
