NYC Housing Authority will need $32B to upgrade housing system over the next 5 years
Investigative Report
By Michael Derek Roberts
The New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has long been a persistent and prickly problem for successive City Administrations. For one thing it is a very large and complex public housing system – the largest in the nation – that has been prone to all kinds of challenges, problems – including sometimes benign and sometimes deliberate governmental neglect – over the years. Now comes a report and conclusion that NYCHA has a whopping $32 billion nightmare and headache. Because that is what it will take to upgrade the housing system over the next 5 years just to get it into a “state of goof repair.”
Today, its safe to say that NYCHA is in a state of acute and permanent crisis underpinned by its present and persistent demands, crumbling buildings neglected for decades, a damning lead paint situation and scandal that found over 850 children being negatively affected by over-exposure to high levels of lead in their apartments. Angry residents have been complaining for decades that many of the apartments are plagued by no heat or hot water in winter, faulty air-conditioning in summer, and elevators that routinely stop working forcing seniors to climb sometimes 10 stories to get to their apartments.
“NYCHA has always been a major problem. I believe its because there is the perception that low-income New Yorkers live there so the problems can be ignored and there is are no consequences for this kind of neglect. And, yes NYCHA is populated mainly by Black and Brown people many of them immigrants and people who work in low-pay- ing jobs,” said community leader and activist Pia Raymond.
She and other housing advocates blame ”chronic disinvestment” in public housing as the root cause of all of NYCHA’s woes. NYCHA’s aging buildings are crumbling and many residents are worried about the health and safety of their children, elders, and neighbors. Since 2001, NYCHA has been shortchanged $3 billion in federal operating and capital funding. NYCHA has been struggling to maintain and repair its aging housing stock for many years. What many New Yorkers may not know is that NYCHA is the country’s largest public housing authority, with over 400,000 people residing in its thousands of units across the city.
The authority is riddled and beset by problems, not least of which is an acute lack of fund- ing that has hobbled its ability to keep its hundreds of thousands of apartments in a state of good repair. For example, this past winter, there were widespread heat and hot water outages affecting approximately 80 percent of all NYCHA residents. Compounding these problems are longstanding ones like broken elevators, leaking roofs and crime.
And despite a string of promises by Governor Andrew Cuomo and New York City’s mayor Bill DeBlasio to start fixing the problems by investing extra money in the agency there’s still a bigger problem and headache that compounds everything: NYCHA is primarily funded by the federal government through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) which has not kept pace with the money needed by NYCHA.
There’s even more bad news in this respect for NYCHA: is situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. The Trump administration released its proposed FY2019 budget in February; it eliminated the Public Housing Capital Fund in its entirety—a move that would take $346 million away from NYCHA’s budget for repairs. Plus the lead paint problem is also a very contentious and will likely to cause the DeBlasio Administration continued embarrassment. A recent announcement by the Mayor ups the number of NYCHA apartments possibly affected by lead paint. Previously the city had estimated that about 50,000 apartments in NYCHA housing had lead paint,
BACKGROUNDER:
The New York City Housing Authority is responsible for maintaining tens of thousands of apartments, which house one in 14 New Yorkers. But its 2,413 buildings are on average more than 60 years old, and they are plagued with leaky roofs, mold, broken elevators and faulty heating systems.
Housing officials said they had lined up funding for only about one-third of the unmet capital needs. at includes billions of dollars from federal, state and city initiatives, along with $1.2 billion from the city as part of a settlement struck in June with federal prosecutors a er they accused NYCHA of mismanagement, wrongdoing and years of deceiving the federal government.
That leaves NYCHA with a hole of more than $22 billion and deepens concerns over the city’s ability to preserve the vast and vital stock of affordable housing, home to at least 400,000 people. More than 700 NYCHA boilers, many of which failed this past winter, have a functional life of five years or less. The agency expects to have all of its boilers up-to-date by 2024, which means some NYCHA developments will still have to rely on dated boilers for several more winters.
Roofs were the only category for which un- met capital needs actually improved since 2011. Housing officials credited that to the mayor’s investment of $1.3 billion to replace leaking roofs, which can cause mold buildup inside apartments. Elevators saw an increase in capital needs from $28 million in 2011 to $1.5 billion in 2017 because the new engineers had a higher “degree of expertise” and spotted significantly more problems. Unmet capital needs are projected to grow to $45.2 billion over 20 years, the report said.
Many housing experts and politicians have acknowledged NYCHA faces a battle for its survival. Amid a two-decade decline in federal funding, many are pointing public-private partnerships as the way of the future to ensure capital dollars and to improve building maintenance. NYCHA is currently experimenting with a federal program to renovate 15,000 pub- lic housing apartments with investment from private developers while ensuring rents remain affordable for residents.
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