When it comes to the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s left hand doesn’t seem to know what its far-left hand is doing. Note the contradictory messages coming from Mayor de Blasio and City Councilmember Ritchie Torres.
Last week, the mayor unveiled his big affordable-housing initiative, the heart of which is to create (or save) some 200,000 low-cost rental properties in the city. Simultaneously, the mayor also announced he intends to give homeless families priority assignment in NYCHA apartments.
The Bloomberg administration ended the homeless-priority practice in 2005. It did so for two reasons. First, to ease NYCHA’s long waiting list. Second, to encourage the homeless toward greater self-sufficiency.
NYCHA has always been a mess. But in the last four years of the Bloomberg era, the waiting list soared and repairs fell by the wayside, even as the agency sat on $1 billion in federal funds. In one year alone, the waiting list for its apartments soared from 160,000 to 250,000.
All of which makes Mayor de Blasio’s decision to give homeless families priority bizarre.
All this move will do is grow the waiting list for apartments and boost the demand for available housing while doing little for what the city needs most: an increase in the supply of available apartments.
In the meantime, Councilman Torres has called for spending $520 million to install security cameras in all NYCHA buildings. He’s responding to the spike in crime in these buildings, even as it’s plunged everywhere else in the city. And we give credit to the Bronx Democrat for recognizing a problem others would rather deny.
The irony is that during his last months as mayor, Mike Bloomberg was often attacked by his would-be successors for floating the idea of fingerprint access for NYCHA buildings as a crime-prevention measure.
Critics pilloried him, saying that NYCHA residents would be “stigmatized” by having to “prove” they belonged in the buildings.
Never mind that some of the poshest properties in the city have finger-scanning technology to keep residents secure and keep dangerous people out.
So now we’re supposed to believe folks in public housing would prefer “Big Brother” security cameras, rather than just pressing their fingers to gain access into their own homes?
Welcome to “Progressive New York,” where bad ideas make social problems worse — and even good ideas never quite go far enough.