By all accounts, Team de Blasio is looking at drastic medicine to turn the New York City Housing Authority around. Better late than never.
Part of the plan involves turning some projects over to private management — projects holding a third of current NYCHA units. It would also sell off air rights and allow private developers to build on un- and under-used NYCHA land, while requiring them to add some “affordable” apartments in the new buildings.
It’s exactly what critics have long warned is needed, what Mayor Mike Bloomberg proposed in his time — and what ideologues like Mayor de Blasio denounced all along.
Bloomberg’s plan was “a pure giveaway to wealthy elites,” de Blasio said. He wanted new buildings on NYCHA land to be entirely “affordable.” Now the mayor’s folks are talking 30 percent “affordable,” near the 20 percent in Bloomberg’s scheme.
In all, the aim is to raise $22 billion of the $32 billion repair bill the agency faces. The about-face will leave de Blasio open to the fury of public-housing advocates who expect cash to just magically appear. It will also anger NYCHA’s unions, already upset at the limited reforms under this mayor.
Tell it to the residents, like those in Far Rockaway’s Ocean Bay Apartments — which have seen major renovations since private management took over last year, including kitchen and bathroom makeovers in hundreds of units.
Key federal funding came via the Obama-era Rental Assistance Demonstration law — a program Team de Blasio has mainly refused to use. But it saw no better choice to fix the Sandy-damaged Ocean Bay complex. Now it’s looking to use RAD and similar programs for a third of NYCHA’s housing stock, though it means “privatization.”
We can’t say that even these changes will be enough: NYCHA’s problems run deep indeed. But they’re far more to the point than simply installing a federal monitor over the agency, as proposed in the consent decree that de Blasio had reached with federal prosecutors — but that federal Judge William Pauley just tossed out as inadequate to NYCHA’s needs.
Pauley’s latest ruling mentioned all these reforms as “desperate — and sometimes politically unpopular — measures” that the agency’s “desperate times” call for. And the medicine might need to get stronger still, he warned, “such as replacing NYCHA’s management or abrogating collective-bargaining agreements and vendor contracts.”
Those thinking they’ll try to block the mayor’s reform plans might consider how much more will need to change if NYCHA doesn’t see major improvements soon.
