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.
Lets see – NYCHA has residents with the highest unemployment rate in the city.
NYCHA has a huge budget shortfall and as a result will have to cut back
SOOOOO why not have those residents who are unemployed ‘help out’ in their community and earn some $.
Oh I know….because the Unions wont allow it!
10:31- the scenario you describe could be used to describe the identical situation that occurs in PRIVATE housing due to Rent Stabilization, as well as Section 8.
Still think living in B. Hill next to the projects is “no big deal”?
Wait and see!!!
Polemicist;
Well said!! I really look forward to the day when the projects are sold off. Their aesthestics derive directly from the statist, socialist mind-set that produced them. They are remnants of the grip that Soviet-style thinking used to have on the mind of NYC. Fortunately, the days of this mindset, like those of the projects and rent control, are numbered.
The saddest thing about the projects, however, are the people trapped in them. These projects do nothing to help their residents move on with their lives. These people have made a sad bargain.
Finally, I have nothing but contempt for the socialists who still try to defend these failures, such as the professor quoted in this story, and the 10.18 poster. How have these projects been a success? Rather than cite the condition of the buildings,or the budget of the NYCHA,please cite some actual PEOPLE who have benefited from the experience of living in a project.
BTW, I know of what I speak, as I spent a few of my formative years in the Red Hook projects. Fortunately, my parents had the good sense to get the hell out as soon as they could.
Benson
Public housing should be designed to help people who are down on their luck, not as a permanent solution to the lack of affordable housing. As it stands, once people get an apartment in the projects they never leave. The will give the apartment to their children and grandchildren who all have the incentive to keep their reportable income low so they do not have to move out. I know several people who are “artists” or work for non-profits who live in the projects in apartments they grew up in so they can save money.
Polemarchus, are you serious? Why don’t we ship off all lower income families to an island where they can fend for themselves. I agree that public housing at its earliest inception lacked a vision for the future and now is a gross failure but to advocate poor less educated people migrating to the “south” is ridiculous, why not divide the entire country? I am not surprised to find this type of thinking on brownstoner
This is Bush’s (and Congress’) fault, and part of the Grover Norquist plan to make government fail. NYC’s public housing has been a success story, overall — one of the best run systems in the country.
I think the rent formula also adds in other housing costs (utilities etc)…it’s supposed to be 30% of income, and NYCHA has already hiked rents at least once.
Way to go Bloomie. Typical of fiscal conservatives. Penny wise pound foolish. Doing something to save money on the short term but creating a situation that impacts our economy and property values profoundly in the longer term.
Iraq
Mortgage Crisis
Education
Healthcare
Public housing is a total failure. Politicians will back the “sell-the-projects idea” when the budget shortfall is so vast the places descend even further into disrepair and ultimately anarchy.
The truth is there should be ONE program for the poor – direct income assistance. We don’t have housing projects because they help anyone; quite the contrary they in fact limit the choices of their residents to better their lives and generations end up being stuck in the system. If you gave public housing residents actual cash payments directly from the federal government, they would leave those hellholes in an instant. 2 parents making $20,000 a year can afford a whole house in the south and jobs for people of modest intellectual means are far more abundant there.
Housing projects are prisons designed to guarantee a permanent underclass will endlessly vote to maintain what they have out of default. Honest wealth redistribution requires at minimum the intervention of the state and more ideally the federal government, but we have to start somewhere. Cities need to get out of the business of caring for the poor. Poor people should have the right – and even the duty – to relocate wherever their skills are most needed. It’s time to let our ghettos die and give our poor the kinds of opportunity that have been denied to them for 40 years.