Opinion

PUBLIC-HOUSING HOPE

IF we had it to do over again, probably no one would rec ommend setting up public housing as it is today — isolating low-income families in densely populated, usually high-rise, projects centrally owned and managed by the New York City Housing Authority in partnership with an often overbearing federal regulatory apparatus in Washington, DC. But that’s the system we have — including some 2,700 residential buildings distributed throughout the five boroughs. Now the question is: Can the Bloomberg administration do more to integrate the projects socially and economically into city life?

Last week, Mayor Bloomberg signaled a new day for public housing by appointing a complete outsider as NYCHA chairman. John Rhea, an African-American who grew up in Detroit, is a graduate of the Harvard Business School and a former investment banker who was the managing director of the Global Consumer Retail Group at Lehman Brothers. Clearly hoping Rhea will bring a fresh perspective to NYCHA’s entrenched problems, the mayor cited his experience in finance and management — which he called two of NYCHA’s “biggest priorities going forward.”

The appointment was immediately attacked by advocates, starting with Councilwoman Rosie Mendez of Manhattan, the chair of the Council’s Public Housing Subcommittee, who grumbled, “All I see is a Wall Street person with an investment-banking background and with no experience in housing management or development.”

Jerilyn Perine, however, the executive director of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council, countered that the appointment reflects an interesting strategy. “You find a smart business guy with a heart and give him your toughest problem. It may work.”

For one thing, notes Perine, NYCHA must now function in a landscape of change — changing federal policies, unstable revenues, a deteriorating local economy — all demanding innovative responses. “NYCHA has property that could be put to work in whole different ways,” she notes. Even without touching a single residential building, NYCHA could, for example, productively redevelop its ugly and grossly underused surface parking lots.

What’s more, NYCHA already has in place a management team, headed by General Manager Douglas Apple, that has deep experience in housing and development. What Rhea can bring to the table is a sympathetic but critical perspective that may force the agency to consider new solutions to its many old problems. NYCHA can’t continue doing business as usual. Even with a much-appreciated allocation of $400 million in federal stimulus funds, NYCHA remains hundreds of millions short in funding its full capital needs.

There are some other hopeful signs. Recently, NCYHA allowed the first charter school on its property — a welcome move, given last year’s Furman Center-Institute for Education and Social Policy report that found that children living in public housing performed substantially worse in school than other poor children.

And NYCHA’s designs, which have been getting better over the last couple of decades, are now good enough to warrant praise from Ada Louise Hux- table, New York’s most eminent architecture critic. Writing last week in The Wall Street Journal, Huxtable contrasted NYCHA’s new Saratoga Avenue Community Center in Brownsville, Brooklyn — which she calls “beautiful, economical, and tough” — with “the dismal, degrading stuff” routinely built by public agencies in poor neighborhoods.

Rhea is accepting one of the most difficult jobs in New York. For the sake of their neighborhoods, all New Yorkers should wish him well — and then pay very close attention to what he and his new agency do.

Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Insti tute.