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This news hit late Friday, but it seemed too huge to ignore today: The Times reports that for the first time in its history, the New York City Housing Authority is planning to demolish a public housing project, Brownsville’s Prospect Plaza Houses. The three towers that make up the complex once housed 1,200 people but they’ve been completely vacant for about 7 years, when NYCHA moved residents out and told them they would eventually be able to return to renovated apartments. Now, however, the agency says that it would actually be more expensive to renovate the buildings than to build new apartments, and it hopes to start construction on new, low-rise replacement buildings in a couple of years. Some former residents, of course, don’t trust NYCHA’s plans: “Several former residents of Prospect Plaza and groups that represent public housing tenants said they did not support the demolition, in part, because it was unclear to them that the authority intended to replace the old units with the same number of new public housing units.”
New York City Plans to Topple Public Housing Towers [NYT] GMAP
Photo from Property Shark.


What's Your Take? Leave a Comment

  1. “Several former residents of Prospect Plaza and groups that represent public housing tenants said they did not support the demolition, in part, because it was unclear to them that the authority intended to replace the old units with the same number of new public housing units.”

    Sounds like a job for Daniel Goldstein.

  2. No, I am not. I read it in the book I referenced above. The projects he described were de facto run by a gang – the police at best looked the other way, at worst they and the tenant leaders were on the payroll. It’s a whole different world and the usual middle class rules of living do not apply.