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2 Brooklyn Complexes With a Ghost-Town Feel
Someone had pried open the metal door of an 11th-floor apartment at a public housing complex in Brooklyn with what appeared to be a crowbar, leaving a gash near the lock. No one was home. But then, no one is ever home: Apartment 11D was vacant. So was 1E insulation covered the door’s missing peephole and at least two dozen other apartments in the 11-story building at the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene.
In another building at the same complex, near Myrtle Avenue and St. Edwards Street, more than half of the 36 units are empty. “It’s a shame,” said a resident, who, like several other tenants, asked that her name not be used out of fear of retribution from her landlord and the neighborhood’s criminal element. “They have them sitting here, just wasted.”
While more than 130,000 families are on the waiting list for a city public housing apartment, hundreds of units at the Ingersoll Houses and the adjacent Whitman Houses are vacant 923 out of nearly 3,500 units, according to the landlord, the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency. The majority are unoccupied because of a costly, long-delayed modernization project that has forced hundreds of tenants to relocate and has fueled rumors, repeatedly denied by the agency, that low-income residents are being pushed out to convert the buildings into private luxury housing as Fort Greene gentrifies.
Anxiety remains high at Whitman and Ingersoll, tenants, elected officials and community advocates said, because unoccupied units have been used by drug dealers, vandals and squatters, and so many apartments have sat empty for so long. Apartments awaiting renovations at both complexes have been vacant for an average of four years, according to the housing agency.
“This is a classic case of administrative mismanagement,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol of Brooklyn. “It’s really pathetic when you think about how long this has taken and how administratively they could have done it better.”
The Housing Authority told residents in October 2004 that the renovations were expected to be completed in five years. This past April, officials said the project was instead scheduled for completion in February 2012. The total cost has now reached $248 million, nearly triple the $83 million the agency said it would cost in 2004. The agency is spending more money to renovate the two low-income complexes than a developer recently spent building a $152 million condominium tower nearby known as Toren.
Agency officials defended their handling of the renovations and their oversight of the vacant units, and described the work as the largest public-housing renovation project in the country. They attributed the delay to the broad scope of the project, which has included combining some apartments in developments that are more than 60 years old, and the complicated process of relocating hundreds of tenants with different housing needs at different times.
Michael Kelly, the housing agency’s new general manager, said it had “turned the corner” on the project, which is being accelerated with $108 million in federal stimulus money and which comes at a time when public housing authorities across the country have chosen to demolish, rather than preserve, many of their buildings.
“This level of reinvestment suggests that Nycha is committed to providing public housing resources for folks for generations to come,” Mr. Kelly said.
So far, 611 units have been renovated and are occupied, with construction under way in some buildings but not yet in others. A 2006 report by the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., found that thousands of apartments at Whitman, Ingersoll and five other developments remained empty longer than necessary because the agency removed units from the rent rolls “well before it had a clear idea of how or when it planned to proceed” with construction projects.
Ingersoll and Whitman are among the city’s oldest public housing developments both comprise a total of 35 6-story, 11-story and 13-story red-brick buildings completed in February 1944. Agency officials have said the units were built as temporary housing, with many providing cramped living space, like kitchens in living rooms or hallways.
The original renovation plans included improving elevator service, adding floors to buildings and reconfiguring some apartments to add space by reducing the number of units per floor. But the original designs were changed because of a lack of financing, and the plan to add floors was dropped.
The project was announced in 2002, and work began in 2006. The first tenants were relocated years before construction started. Residents could transfer to other apartments in their developments or elsewhere in the city, or receive a federal voucher that would allow them to move into subsidized private housing.
Lynn Godfrey, a Housing Authority spokeswoman, said the agency had tried to minimize the disruption, in part by paying moving expenses. “Given the huge mass undertaking and what we will accomplish at the end, the hope is that people will feel that it was well worth it,” she said.
Yet skepticism and a lingering suspicion remains. “It looked more to me like they wanted to get the people in an exodus, to move them out of here as quickly as they could,” said Edward Carter, 76, a longtime tenant at Whitman.
At Ingersoll, the windows of a few empty units have been shattered. Teenagers who broke into a vacant unit in the building recently left the door unlocked. One evening, there was a bicycle next to the refrigerator, gang graffiti on the walls and a condom wrapper on the floor. The light in the kitchen still worked.
At Whitman, 17 percent of the units are vacant. At Ingersoll, nearly 35 percent are empty.
“As these renovations have been taking place over the last several years, Whitman and Ingersoll have had a ghost-town-like feel to them,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn.
A woman who lives in the Ingersoll building with the vacant unit with the missing peephole said it had been used recently by crack dealers. While crime has increased slightly at Ingersoll and Whitman with 58 felony assaults and other serious crimes reported this year, as of November, compared with 49 in the same period last year Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said there was no “crime trend” related to the vacant apartments.
Residents received some good news last month, when the Housing Authority held a ribbon-cutting for a $7 million community center on Myrtle Avenue. It had been expected to open in 2004.
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