NYCHA Funding Shortfall Could Mean Dark Days for Projects
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…
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.
The low rents that people who live in the projects pay are often the only thing standing between them and the city shelter system. Take away low rents in NYCHA and you’ll have a huge influx of people into family shelters.
“Why is it race/class baiting – to point out that the population that lives in the projects are generally not well educated and their children are on a similar path???? And that this path leads to failure?”
Is Stuy Town and Cooper Village projects? Was they built to help people coming back from war?
In projects you have working class people too. Like Cops, Firefighters and city workers.
“Better we should ignore it What?”” Do you care about poeple in Housing Projects??!! You sound disingenuous and properly worried about your house value.
You see the war is gonna end one day. They may start another one but this one will surely end in tears.
“How can people who have never worked a steady job in their lives and who can’t read, write or speak effectively; going to be helped by my NYC jobs?”
How you know that??!! Dumdassed white boy become President! Nobody say anything about that! Maybe those people can help themselves by sticking a Gun in your face. Make you get on the ground and stomping you to death. Maybe then they can “support themselves”
The What (Hee Hee)
Someday this war is gonna end….
How can people who have never worked a steady job in their lives and who can’t read, write or speak effectively; going to be helped by my NYC jobs?
Benson: I thank you for your brilliantly written post that is far more articulate than anything I could have written this morning.
I really don’t see what is so controversial about giving people the choice to live wherever they want.
You are right though, it does seem like a certain segment of the population considers the poor some kind of accessory to their lives. Do they thrive on keeping people in these dead end, failed social experiments so they have SOMEONE to perpetually care about?
I’ve always resisted the notion that altruistic feelings are a form of decadence, but truly it seems that way in this instance.
12:22
The problem with housing projects – and the entire poverty debate in general in NYC – is the entire system is built around the minorities of NYC circa 1965. The vast majority of non-elderly residents of public housing in NYC are black, Puerto Rican, or Dominican. Race always comes into the discussion for this reason.
Why is it race/class baiting – to point out that the population that lives in the projects are generally not well educated and their children are on a similar path???? And that this path leads to failure?
Better we should ignore it What?
Benson, I take this opportunity, on behalf of the poor of New York City, to thank you and Polemicist for your suggestions on how they should order their lives. If
you can swallow your nausea long enough to accept their thanks, you are a champ.
I bet they never thought of moving down South, away from friends, family, jobs, houses of worship, familiar places, and all the things that make where they live home. Since moving 600 to 1000 miles away to an uncertain future is so easy and cheap, I’m sure they will thank you for allowing them the opportunity to better themselves.
Since they can barely afford to live here, I’m sure packing up and moving 8 states away will be really affordable. Maybe they will just leave their belongings and buy new there. Start fresh. Since the housing available for lower income people in the South is generally of worse quality than almost anything here, I’m sure they will thank you for your concern during the next hurricane.
However, may I take this moment to remind you both of a few facts. One, not all people in the projects are black, nor do all poor black people live in the projects, so the literacy rate statistic really is bogus. Secondly, a great deal of the migration of African Americans out of New York to the South is of retired middle class people doing what white middle class retirees have been doing for years, going South. You toss around upstate, the Midwest, down South like they are economic meccas. They are not. Have you been midstate NY lately? I have. There is no economic growth there, hasn’t been for years. I see trailers in the yards of middle class homes, because the kids can’t afford to buy houses, and leave. The only jobs up there are the kinds that have to exist anywhere, like teachers, bus drivers, hospital workers and salesclerks at Walmart. There is very little new industry, and certainly very little industry for unskilled labor. And all those jobs are filled by the people who live there now. The same is true down South, in the Midwest, etc.
So while it is fun to be nauseated by my so-called self serving fake concern, you offer no real solution other than by advocating the removal in NYC, of the “problemâ€. Those who want to move away from the city don’t need your pat on the head for doing so, and those who stay need real jobs. Real jobs is the answer to whether or not the poor anywhere are helped, and that is not going to happen until this country stops sending jobs overseas and invests in its people. “Self reverential platitudes†may be all I have at this time, but those are better than simply advocating that the plight of the poor can easily be solved by them getting the hell out of town.
Montrose Morris
Shenani!
Someday this war’s gonna end. That’d be just fine with the boys on the boat. They weren’t looking for anything more than a way home. Trouble is, I’d been back there, and I knew that it just didn’t exist anymore.
Captain Benjamin L. Willard – Apocalypse Now
Like moths to a flame! Post a picture of a darken project building and let the hate fly. Classic race baiting tactics and covert race/class warfare!
Now Brownstoner, what is the true purpose of the Blog? Is it to promote the restoration of brownstones or to promote hatred among the people of Brooklyn. I think this is proof positive of your motives.
You have no more credibly with The What! I see for what it is, let get get rid of the poor/black people of Brownstone Brooklyn.
One thing I feel reel good these days because “Someday this war is gonna end..”
The What
Someday this war is gonna end…
Yes, stop saying anything about living in projects and being poor. Just keep paying for people to remain poor and in the projects though – But you have no right to question it.