A 1930's poster promoting public housing in New York as a healthy alternative to slums. Such promotions have been drowned as decades of neglect and mismanagement have made the public housing units themselves unhealthy.
The New York City Housing Authority, including its arms-length owner, New York City, have been caught between a rock and a hard place for many years now.
The rock: an estimated $40 billion plus repair bill for decades of neglect by its funders and managers.
The hard place: NYCHA public housing is the largest concentration of remaining public housing in America. Like American public housing everywhere across the nation, it’s been declared surplus to requirements for decades. Unfortunately, there’s a core of public housing that has not been permitted to lie down and die. The reason? Private enterprise schemes, fuelled by dollars from a number of low and no income housing supports, have simply not produced anything remotely like the amount of housing needed to shelter those who can’t keep up with disastrously-rising housing free-market rents.
The solution? The Chairman of the Authority, Greg Russ has a plan for managing the debt that will be needed to repair the public housing.
There are, of course, naysayers.1 All the more reason that Housing Authorities everywhere will be fascinated with how that plan might work.
Red more in the New York Daily News: Finally, a NYCHA rescue plan
