New York has a great shot at finally solving the decades-old chronic funding crisis that has crippled the city’s public housing authority. The question is whether our leaders have the will and the nerve to move beyond past failures and seize the chance to transform our largest source of permanently affordable housing.
For decades, the federal government has cut back on funding for public housing across the country, leaving New York struggling to pay for elevators, plumbing, roofs, removal of poisonous lead paint and other upkeep of its 170,000 apartments. NYCHA needs an estimated $40 billion to bring its developments to a state of good repair.
That $40 billion — a figure that increases by about $1 billion every year — is important. When candidates for mayor and other politicians promise to come up with one or two billion for NYCHA, it all sounds very dramatic, but we’ve reached the point where these small, partial solutions won’t cut it.
The crisis is thoroughly bipartisan. NYCHA’s capital backlog was not cured during the Obama administration, when Democrats controlled the White House and both houses of Congress from 2009 to 2010, and the situation did not meaningfully improve when Republicans controlled all three branches of government in 2017-2018.
Instead, our cash-starved housing authority has continued to fight a losing battle to keep apartments in decent shape, knowing they lacked the money to even begin doing so — a policy that amounts to demolition by neglect.
Enter Greg Russ, the current chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, named as CEO by the federal Justice Department and the Department of Housing and Urban Development following a series of scandals in NYCHA management.
Russ has proposed a blueprint to secure a vast amount of funding to repair the authority’s crumbling, leaky and moldy apartments. His idea is to create a Public Housing Preservation Trust that would pool money from multiple sources, including appropriations from city, state and federal governments and funding from federal Section 8 and Tenant Protection Vouchers.
The money in the Trust would act as a kind of collateral, allowing the Trust to raise six times as much borrowed capital by selling bonds. Ironclad legal restrictions would ensure that all housing would remain permanently public and affordable, with tenants charged no more than 30% of their income.
It’s the first strategy in a long time that might bring in the tens of billions of dollars needed by NYCHA — and on one level, it’s surprisingly simple. In purely financial terms, the Trust idea is akin to the way New York has paid for schools, bridges, tunnels and other public works for decades.
But New Yorkers, especially public housing residents, have endured so many failures by NYCHA over the years that even Russ’s very sound plan is drawing a response that risks blowing past skepticism into a kind of toxic defeatism.
“I don’t trust the Trust,” Assemblyman Charles Barron said at a hearing on the plan in December.
“I have some serious concerns about the Trust and the vouchers proposal,” said Assemblyman Ron Kim.
“This is not the model that I can say that I support wholeheartedly at this time,” said Assemblywoman Latrice Walker.
The leader of the NYCHA tenants group was a naysayer as well.
“The Citywide Council of Presidents do not agree with the blueprint plan for change,” said Daniel Barber, the chairman of Citywide Council of Presidents.
The negative reaction is based on years of bad experiences with NYCHA. Multiple plans to reorganize the authority’s management and change broken processes have come to grief.
There is also a persistent, paralyzing and baseless conspiracy theory that New York real estate interests are quietly plotting to buy up public housing and evict all the tenants. (As with many conspiracy theories, the fact there’s zero evidence is cited as evidence of just how secret and devious the scheme is.)
Not all stakeholders are sour on the proposal. Greg Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237, which represents the majority of NYCHA employees, says he’s open to the plan, especially since there aren’t many alternatives coming from Albany or anywhere else that reach the scale of the billions needed to save public housing.
“The greatest risk, as we see it, is maintaining the status quo,” Russ said, telling my NY1 colleague Courtney Gross: “If someone has a better set of ideas — if someone could generate as much money in the time that we’re talking about — we’d be glad to chat with them.”
Me too.
Politicians and activists who want to shoot down the prospect of billions of dollars have a political and moral obligation to tell the rest of us exactly where they plan to find $40 billion in the next few years.
Don’t hold your breath waiting.
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.
