After years of little change at the top, New York’s largest landlord of rental housing — the New York City Housing Authority — is under new leadership. They are the most powerful people you don’t know — affecting every New Yorker in every neighborhood in the five boroughs.
Between the units it owns directly — 178,554 apartments in 2,607 residential buildings — and those it leases using federal Section 8 vouchers, NYCHA houses 7.8% of New Yorkers in over 13% of the city’s rental stock. No other real estate entity approaches it in size, scale or geographic distribution.
It owns some of the finest and most historic projects in the country — including Harlem River Houses and First Houses in Manhattan and Williamsburg Houses in Brooklyn — as well as some of the worst. And while NYCHA has staved off the catastrophic deterioration followed by demolition that brought so many large authorities, like Chicago, St. Louis and Baltimore, to near ruination, its projects nonetheless mostly look under-maintained and neglected. Can the new leaders turn things around?
Mayor Bloomberg appointed former banker John Rhea chairman in May — he just finished his first 100 days this week. Rhea then appointed Michael Kelly, the former executive director of the Washington, DC, Housing Authority, as NYCHA general manager (the top operational position) on Oct. 1. There’s much to be hopeful for about in this new leadership. If Kelly and Rhea succeed in implementing the principles they’re talking about now, neighborhoods are likely to see some good things happen where problems have long festered.
Banker Rhea’s first aim is to “fix the fiscal deficit.” This makes sense, given the hundreds of millions of dollars in operating deficits that have resulted from ever rising costs and ever declining government support. And while Rhea and Kelly will work hard to get the Obama administration to restore the subsidies slashed during the Bush years, they know they have to look to their own resources as well.
Kelly has had to do precisely this before, having headed three of the most troubled authorities in the country — San Francisco, New Orleans, and most recently, DC. In Washington, says Paul Graziano, a former NYCHA general manager who now heads the Baltimore authority, Kelly redeveloped badly distressed projects into mixed-use, mixed-income, revenue-producing properties. “Kelly capitalized on the strength of DC’s very high real estate values,” says Graziano. “He looked at the housing authority’s assets and recognized they were underutilized — and that he could provide better housing conditions for existing residents by bringing in a mix of incomes.”
He not only replaced forbidding towers on Washington’s riverfront with attractive low-rise housing, he attracted office space, a restaurant where there had never been one, and the largest supermarket east of the Mississippi.
In other words, using federal Hope VI funds, Kelly was able to accomplish something that’s only been tried in the most tentative way in New York. He knows it can be done because he did it, says Jerilyn Perine, a former city housing commissioner who is now executive director of the Citizens Housing & Planning Council. “The future of public resources is a shrinking one,” she warns. “It doesn’t matter who’s president, and doesn’t matter what the policy experts say, government is going to have ever less money to devote to this housing stock in the future.”
Finances aside, Rhea argues that traditional projects, which were often designed to be insular, need to be made “part of the broader neighborhood. How do we open up these projects physically? Do we reopen streets that have been closed? Do we encourage commercial activity where there’s been none? Do we develop schools on NYCHA property to create more vitality?”
Rhea’s answer is: all of the above. One of his first actions as chairman was to welcome a new charter school, Coney Island Prep, locating in a housing authority community center — the first ever. The school’s presence both reinforces Rhea’s drive to open up public housing and acts as a substantive response to last year’s blisteringly critical report by New York University’s Furman Center, which said that children in public housing seriously underperformed in school.
Rhea sees the physical isolation of the projects as reflecting and reinforcing economic isolation, noting that the authority is committed to eradicating poverty both through aggressive job training and by hiring residents directly when possible. “We have to be about the business of ensuring the economic ability of our residents,” he says. “Residents who can pay more in rent are likely to have fewer issues that cause their families to break down in social problems.”
Rhea is not talking about wealthy people, but about hard-working, striving households. “Almost half of our residents are working families with median incomes in the area of about $25,000 a year,” he says.
And what about the other half? Those who are not working either because they can’t (elderly or handicapped residents, for example) or because they won’t? The latter are at the center of the most virulent ongoing debates about the role of public housing in big cities.
“Public housing was intended to be a ladder up and out, not a permanent address,” says former commissioner Perine. “Now we see a generational permanency of life in public housing, which doesn’t suit anybody’s needs. There has to be a combination of a helping hand for those who need it and an aspirational vision for living outside a government environment. Until we start looking at public housing as a part of the housing market, not as a permanent piece of the welfare infrastructure that should never be altered it’s not going to change.”
Perine thinks this is the moment to start talking about fundamental change. “We all watch New York and think of it as the beacon,” Graziano says. “What gets done in New York will influence the rest of the country.”
Julia Vitullo-Martin is a senior fellow and the director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association.