City Hall News reports that the New York City Housing Authority is looking at a $200 million budget shortfall this year, which some officials say is likely to result in worsening conditions at public housing. You see the conditions they’re living in and the problems they’re going through, says Council Member Rosie Mendez (D-Manhattan), who chairs the Council’s Public Housing Committee, and you’re sort of helpless in trying to rectify the situation. Last year NYCHA had a $168 million budget deficit. As federal funding for the projects has dried up, so too have city and state dollars. In recent years NYCHA has laid off thousands of employees and cut hundreds of millions of dollars from its operating budget. Some public housing advocates say that the city uses the projects as a “cash cow,” collecting millions every year for things like police services. Although there have been rumors that some of the city’s public housing stock would be sold off to private developers, Nicholas Dagen Bloom, an assistant professor at the New York Institute of Technology and author of “Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century,” says that’s probably not going to happen. It’s not likely the program will be privatized, he says, but there will be structural changes in the way it operates to reflect current conditions, which is higher costs. The are currently more than 400,000 residents of public housing in the city, and rent averages $320 a month for tenants who earn, on average, $20,000 a year.
The City’s Own Looming Housing Crisis [City Hall]
HUD Official Speaks the Unspeakable: Selling The Projects [Brownstoner]
Politicians Can’t Back Sell-The-Projects Idea [Brownstoner]
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