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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]
Photo by bondidwhat.


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  1. The poor in this country have nothing to do with the rich. The richest of us contribute the most to society in terms of taxes, generating jobs, and economic activity. It sounds like 4:15 has the same tired, predictible, short-sighted ideas as every other liberal redistributionist in this country – Tax the rich until they are poor and throw money at the poor people so they live like they rich.

    Forget anything relating to basic economics and the incentives of the free market, lets get rich people to pay for everything we want.

  2. 4.15 PM;

    Now that you have established that you are morally superior to us (especially Polemicist and myself), what do you suggest actually be done about the current situation in the projects, or are you saying that they are functioning just fine?

    Benson

  3. The “greedy corporate types” making enough money to “send 500 kids to college” already do – by their taxes. Everyone in this city who pays (uncapped) NYC taxes, (uncapped)state taxes and property taxes pays for those who (1) can’t or (2) won’t help themselves. I don’t see anyone here asking for a tax reduction, so save your animosity thanks.

    Your baseless stereotyping of those with money as having no “moral or ethical” conciousness is exactly that – baseless. You have no idea about who actually contributes to charities, who makes the connections to get them to work and who are the people who came up with, and saw through, the ideas of welfare and government housing. It was the very people you abhor.

    Save us your worn rich = bad nonsense.

  4. Poverty is a lousy way to live and there is an element of truth to most of the issues. I don’t object to discussing issues but it is all too obvious that certain people use legitimate issues and questions a a springboard to vent their real issue- and that is race. Nearly every discussion we have on B’stoner, race is the 800 lb gorilla in the room, and too many people equate welfare and crime with a particular group- in NYC, we’ve focused on Black people. Whether its a matter of demographics or not, we have a skewed perception thanks to our headline based interpretation of life in NYC.

    Poverty, and I say this for those of you who have never experienced it, not only makes for a poor and short list of life choices, it also makes you feel you can’t escape, that you are powerless to change things. for a lot of people that is the reality and for those of you who have never had to navigate the welfare or assistance system in NYC, you will rarely find a more mind-numbing, uncaring, emotion-deadening, demeaning structure so geared to cutting the legs out from under you.

    That so many people actually do make it out of the projects is a tribute to them, not the system. And the fact that these people are very much ignored in forums like this by people with money who have no moral or ethical consciousness, only proves my point.If the society of the projects is a self-perpetuating one, it certainly gets more than its fair share of help in staying that way.

    And frankly, a society without compassion isn’t much of a society. I’ve lived in rich neighborhoods and poor ones. I’ve had money and I’ve been poor. Poor people are made to feel powerless and useless, no matter how hard they work. You can read the attitude on this thread- poor people are a drain on society, etc, etc, etc,. Yet if anyone group can be said to be draining our society and our country, it is the rich, the greedy corporate types who make enough money in one year to send 500 kids to college, or buy books for every child in public school. It’s the Halliburtons, the Bushes, the Roves, and their friends who close ranks against the rest of the country. Don’t ever think money makes you better than anyone else.

  5. I am totally against you 3:35 – I have tons of sympathy – but frankly sympathy is near worthless – only a cultural change toward education will change anything within NYCs underclass.

  6. I was born in the projects of another country, where the projects dweelers are mainly white (scotland). The same attitudes, graffiti, pissin-in-the-lifts, vandalism, drug use, welfare dependency and apathy exist there too. Its a self-perpetuating culture that will never be fixed by throwing money at it.

    No-one can help you, you have to help yourself. Education and working hard, but intelligently, is the key for most. Just don’t go to a school where all the other projecters are.

  7. I worked on fishing boats when I was 16 and put myself through school. The work was incedibly hard with long hours and back-breaking work, but it paid very well and allowed me to pay my way through college and led to a very lucrative professional career.

    Funny thing is, when I was running one of the boats, I could never find people to work. I would hire anyone willing to work hard, and often the underprivileged and even homeless people. They would come out and last maybe 2 or 3 days. After that they would quit or never show-up again. I could’nt understand it until I entered the business world.

    These people did not want to work hard to get ahead, they just wanted it handed to them. I offered so many people the opportunity to make a decent honest living, but the Hard Work requirement of the deal was a total turn-off for them.

    That is why so many will be stuck in poverty forever. I have no sympathy because I know if you really, really want to improve your life, the opportunity is out there for anyone.

  8. 12:18 – EXACTLY! my first job paid $14,000 and i paid $265 in rent. why are these people so frickin special in the projects? if you keep maintaining them in this manner they will never ever make it. you need to get your sh*t together and try really really hard in this world.

    also, the education is there! read read read. newspapers, books in the library. also, work as soon as you can.

    I had jobs my whole life. sometimes 2.

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