The public housing where 400,000 New Yorkers live has in far too many cases fallen into disrepair. Leaks are chronic. Rodents run rampant. Mold grows. Elevators break and await repairs. Entry doors have broken locks. So do boilers and gas burners. All told, the cost of outstanding fixes adds up to an impossible-to-fathom $78 billion, up from an estimated $45 billion just a few years ago. That’s just the monetary cost; the mounting psychological weight on residents is immeasurable.
The problems aren’t spread evenly across the city’s 2,400 buildings and 335 NYCHA developments, and there have been some notable improvements in recent years, but the big picture is still deeply dispiriting.
The good news is that necessity has been the mother of invention: A couple of huge management innovations are giving more of these apartments and the city-within-a-city that lives in them a chance to turn the corner. The most significant is called PACT, which stands for Permanent Affordability Commitment Together. It’s the city’s name for the federal program called Rental Assistance Demonstration.
It works as follows: Traditional public-housing developments get converted to what’s known as Section 8. This lets public developments, newly under private management, tap into tax credits, mortgages and bonds to tackle costly needs. PACT has already taken off in 61 developments with some 16,000 apartments. Though it’s not a perfect record, repairs are generally getting done much more quickly than under the hide-bound old regime.
Now, in Manhattan, NYCHA is on the verge of another major milestone: using PACT to demolish and rebuild 18 buildings with thousands of apartments, in the Fulton and Elliott-Chelsea Houses. More than 2,000 old units with ever more costly repair needs would be razed, and over the next seven years, developers would build new, far easier-to-maintain public housing in their place — along with 3,500 private mixed-income housing units on the same campus.
Throughout the project, NYCHA tenants will keep their same lease rights, and anyone who ends up displaced from their current apartment before the new buildings are complete would get to move into vacant units while awaiting return to the development as soon as it’s ready.
Wednesday, the Housing Authority board approved the plan, which means a piece of it only now awaits final federal environmental review.
Board Chair Jamie Rubin put it this way: “The only way to restore NYCHA to the status that it once had, which is the glory of the United States public housing system, is to reinvest in the buildings at scale.”
Amen to that. But smart as Rubin is, he’s a well-off guy who doesn’t live in NYCHA. For more insight, hear Miguel Acevedo, president of the Fulton Houses Tenant Association, who calls the way people are now forced to live “disgusting” and says, “If we wait any longer, [the buildings] are going to end up getting condemned…the sooner we get this done and over with, people are going to have brand new lives, brand new buildings to live in, and won’t have to worry.”
PACT is one of two big new tools helping rescue NYCHA and those who live there. The other, the Public Housing Preservation Trust, is a new government agency that speeds repairs and renovations by being eligible for a greater share of federal funding — and following streamlined procurement rules.
NYCHA remains in the throes of an emergency. PACT and the Trust are the first responders. Let them through.
