Hundreds of public housing tenants booed NYCHA Chairman John Rhea Wednesday at a packed hearing that turned into a festival of complaints about the agency’s mismanagement and inability to improve deteriorating conditions.
Rhea and the NYCHA board sat stone-faced and silent on stage as speaker after speaker assailed them for a litany of failures.
The agency — which houses 600,000 New Yorkers — has been roundly criticized for sitting on funds while its aging buildings deteriorate. The top source of enmity was NYCHA’s plan to lease public land at eight Manhattan developments for luxury apartments to raise about $50 million a year.
Controller John Liu, a mayoral candidate, says there is $700 million in unused funds for building upgrades at the same time NYCHA is trying to borrow another $750 million from the federal government.
