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.
Montrose;
Your posts are truly nauseating. You are more interested in demonstrating that you “care” than in actually solving problems.
More to the point, your logic turns on itself.
You state “If 9:49 thinks it’s so easy and possible to live on $20K a year, he should be made to do it. I would love to see how he tries to house, feed, clothe, transport, and otherwise live on $370 a week with a family, in New York City.”
Bingo!!! Exactly the point: a person on a low income, be they working or a fixed-income elderly, cannot make it here. Instead of putting them up in a barrack where they have no chance of getting out of a dead-end situation, what Polemicist is advocating is that they be given the CHOICE to move where that level of income can fetch a decent life. There are FAR more opportunities for people with modest skills to have a decent life in the South, Upstate, the Midwest, etc., than in the economy of NYC. It is for this reason that the largest out-migration from NYC right now (as recently cited in a speech by Governor Paterson) is by working-class African-Americans, who have the good sense to know where there opportunities lie.
What is nauseating to me about your post is that is is derived from your need to demonstrate that you “care”, and never actually deals with the facts on the ground, or offers a practical solution. We don’t need your self-referential platitudes.
Benson
Polemicist, I thank all of the Higher Powers that you and Benson and 9:49 are not in charge.
First of all, public housing does not only house those you feel are living large on the cheap. It houses a huge population of the elderly on fixed incomes, the disabled, and those with serious medical and physical conditions that prevent them from working or earning enough to get out. They cannot simply “go South”.
And speaking of which, please provide more than anecdotal evidence to show the viability of living down south. The reason there are so many foreclosures down there is because THERE ARE NO JOBS. Manufacturing is leaving or left, textile factories and heavy industry left years ago. Even auto plants are downsizing or delaying openings because of the economy and the fuel prices. Do you propose that they revive the time honored practice of sharecropping, migrant farm work and cheap servants? Newsflash, THOSE jobs are taken, too. It’s cheap to live there by NY standards because people make more money here. Moving down South to work for minimum wage provides no better a standard of living there than living here in the projects. You just broil all year instead of for only 3 months. And who are you to socially engineer who lives in New York City. We don’t ship people Down South like convicts to Australia, to “clean house†so the projects can be reclaimed for the “worthyâ€. Not yet, and not ever.
If 9:49 thinks it’s so easy and possible to live on $20K a year, he should be made to do it. I would love to see how he tries to house, feed, clothe, transport, and otherwise live on $370 a week with a family, in New York City.
No one in the projects has a right to live in a “prime” location? What elitist arrogance. Public housing was built in areas that were undesireable, out of the way, and in neighborhoods that the upper classes did not even visit. In the case of the housing around the Navy Yard, they were built to house workers during WW2, also in a place that no one was particularly interested in. NOW, that the city has grown, it’s prime land. Well, isn’t that a crime, that some poor person has a better view than one of the deserving rich?
Public housing has a multitude of problems that need to be fixed, no doubt. And people need to change that mindset of generational dependency. I will be the first person to agree with you on that. A bloated infrastructure of waste, corruption and ineptitude, on both sides of the tenant/administration relationship exists, and needs massive cleaning up, BUT, public housing is here because it is the right thing to do. Housing is a right, because everyone has a right to a roof over their head in the richest city in the richest country on the planet.
Polemicist, I thank all of the Higher Powers that you and Benson and 9:49 are not in charge.
First of all, public housing does not only house those you feel are living large on the cheap. It houses a huge population of the elderly on fixed incomes, the disabled, and those with serious medical and physical conditions that prevent them from working or earning enough to get out. They cannot simply “go South”.
And speaking of which, please provide more than anecdotal evidence to show the viability of living down south. The reason there are so many foreclosures down there is because THERE ARE NO JOBS. Manufacturing is leaving or left, textile factories and heavy industry left years ago. Even auto plants are downsizing or delaying openings because of the economy and the fuel prices. Do you propose that they revive the time honored practice of sharecropping, migrant farm work and cheap servants? Newsflash, THOSE jobs are taken, too. It’s cheap to live there by NY standards because people make more money here. Moving down South to work for minimum wage provides no better a standard of living there than living here in the projects. You just broil all year instead of for only 3 months. And who are you to socially engineer who lives in New York City. We don’t ship people Down South like convicts to Australia, to “clean house†so the projects can be reclaimed for the “worthyâ€. Not yet, and not ever.
If 9:49 thinks it’s so easy and possible to live on $20K a year, he should be made to do it. I would love to see how he tries to house, feed, clothe, transport, and otherwise live on $370 a week with a family, in New York City.
Public housing has a multitude of problems that need to be fixed, no doubt. And people need to change that mindset of generational dependency. I will be the first person to agree with you on that. A bloated infrastructure of waste, corruption and ineptitude, on both sides of the tenant/administration relationship exists, and needs massive cleaning up, BUT, public housing is here because it is the right thing to do
I agree that at any time, any one of us could find ourselves way down on our luck and public housing can offer a TEMPORARY solution.
Where is the oversight in giving people free or extremely low cost housing ad infinitum?
Where are the work for welfare programs?
Since when has housing been a right and in “prime” locations?
I have seen a trend in razing hi-rise projects in favor of 2-3 family public housing. It creates a better sense of “this is my place” and lessens the overall impact on the neighborhood.
Jimmy Legs:
So, the only possible course of action here is to keep these people in government owned barracks and not give them the choice of where to live OR turn them into food.
Brilliant.
You should run for public office! You can use it as a campaign slogan “Vote for me, so I can continue to fund your crap hole apartment, otherwise evil people like Polemicist will turn you into food!”
Polemicist – the projects are far from ‘barracks’ or a ‘crap hole’ – unless you consider the near identical “luxury apartments” at Sty Town and Peter Copper Village to be ‘barracks’ as well.
The issue with the projects is not the design, architecture or the layout – the issues all revolve around the residents, not the physical buildings.
10:26
I think you need to read my post again.
We don’t need 3 million people with high school diplomas to work in retail in this city. There will never be enough jobs for them. On some level, these people realize this.
All I am saying is it is THEY who should have the choice to determine where they live. Right now, it is extraordinarily difficult for a truly poor person to just move out of a housing project and get an apartment elsewhere in the country.
If you want to open a factory in the Bronx and employ loads of people who can barely read or write – go for it! So far, employment options for such people are severely limited here, and there is ample evidence that housing projects are a direct cause of this. Literacy rates amongst blacks for instance are much lower today than in the days prior to the creation of public housing.
Anyway, the south is cheap! I have a cousin in Georgia who works as a grade school teacher making less than $30K a year and her husband manages a fast food restaurant. They have a nice 4-bedroom house and 2 cars. If we simply gave poor families $30K a year and had a national health plan, it’d be easy for these folks to get a 2- or 3-bedroom house and one car. That is way better than a crap hole in city owned barracks. What would you choose?
Actually the unions have been working with NYCHA residents to get them apprenticeships in construction, working on repairs and rehab on public housing. It’s required under federal law.
Polemecist,
what ‘skills’ do the poor offer, and where might these skills be in demand?
Soylent Green?