Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 1, past
By: David A. Smith
What bureaucrat can we blame for this?
The New York Times story inspiring this post follows the time-honored journalistic formula for spotlighting a problem to deplore: start with an incontrovertibly deplorable problem, chase it with a provocative quote, and skate superficially through the background.
It’s simple, class; to publish, you must write
Someone had pried open the metal door of an 11th-floor apartment at a public housing complex in Brooklyn with what appeared to be a crowbar, leaving a gash near the lock. No one was home. But then, no one is ever home:
“This is a classic case of administrative mismanagement,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol of
Assemblyman Lentol knows who he wants to blame
While Mr. Lentol is of course entitled to his opinion, he’s wrong. His explanation fingers the convenient whipping boy of faceless bureaucracy, rather than seeing Ingersoll and Whitman as archetypal of what’s wrong with the Gordian knot of our whole public housing delivery system, and how rehab deferred is rehab denied.
To give Mr. Lentol his due, the situation is utterly unacceptable:
At Ingersoll, the windows of a few empty units have been shattered.
Empty windows are invariably broken, and broken windows invariably lead to broken rules. A streetscape of physical neglect leads to a society that neglects its laws.
Teenagers who broke into a vacant unit in the building recently left the door unlocked. One evening, there was a bicycle next to the refrigerator, gang graffiti on the walls and a condom wrapper on the floor.
Ingersoll in
Like many
Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses in
And it’s named after an inspiring figure:
Raymond V. Ingersoll (1875-1940) served as Parks Commissioner and Brooklyn Borough President and was a staunch advocate for Public Housing. He also championed broader public use of parks, playgrounds and beaches. He was instrumental in the consolidation of the subway systems, creation of health centers, a central library building, the
Dreams notwithstanding, empty apartments are temporary houses of crime; they invite neighborhoods to become slums.
At Whitman, 17% of the units are vacant. At Ingersoll, nearly 35% are empty.
To form a viable civil society, properties need high occupancy. Anything above (say) 15% vacant has probably double the security risk. Anything above 30% vacant is asking for a crime plague, and it becomes essential to board up the buildings to prevent vermin human and animal.
“As these renovations have been taking place over the last several years, Whitman and Ingersoll have had a ghost-town-like feel to them,” said Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries of
Assemblyman Jeffries worries about ghost towns
No question about it, that much vacancy is a threat
A woman who lives in the Ingersoll building with the vacant unit with the missing peephole said it had been used recently by crack dealers. While crime has increased slightly at Ingersoll and Whitman — with 58 felony assaults and other serious crimes reported this year, as of November, compared with 49 in the same period last year — Paul J. Browne, the Police Department’s chief spokesman, said there was no “crime trend” related to the vacant apartments.
No trend, just chronic crime, and it will persist until Ingersoll is substantial improved. Will it be?
Michael Kelly, the housing agency’s new general manager, said it had “turned the corner” on the project, which is being accelerated with $108 million in federal stimulus money and which comes at a time when public housing authorities across the country have chosen to demolish, rather than preserve, many of their buildings.
An optimist after thirty years: Mike Kelly
I’ve known Mike Kelly many years; in that interval, he’s run the Washington DC Housing Authority, and before that, the Housing Authority of New Orleans (HANO). Not only is he a centurion of public housing, he’s among the most capable and best-respected executives in housing authorities nationally, and currently president of the Council of Large Public Housing Authorities (CLPHA, rhymes with laffa).
A noble motto: wish it were truer
“This level of reinvestment suggests that NYCHA is committed to providing public housing resources for folks for generations to come,” Mr. Kelly said.
How did Ingersoll and Whitman get to this sorry state, with these protracted delays and unfulfilled promises? The inter-related causes are emblematic of public housing’s challenges. Ingersoll and Whitman demonstrate why, if we do not comprehensively remake the delivery system, and enable entities like NYCHA to become essential housing authorities, all of public housing will face the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come with futures like theirs.
The reasons are legion.
1. Illegitimate birth
Ingersoll and Whitman were developed in haste:
Ingersoll and Whitman are among the city’s oldest public housing developments — both comprise a total of 35 6-story, 11-story and 13-story red-brick buildings completed in February 1944.
What
They were built amidst emergency:
The upgrade is long overdue, as the buildings have been out of compliance with the buildings code ever since they were transferred by the US Navy to the city. Did you catch that? The city has been running the complex for decades under conditions that it would never allow a private owner to. The shortcomings include everything from a lack of real kitchens in some units to insufficient light and air levels.
Hector Elizondo, age 73 in 2009
2. Decades of non-reinvestment
For the first decade after their completion, Ingersoll and Whitman probably received little upgrading, because New York was in the midst of a major demographic and real estate boom driven by returning GI’s eager to start families.
Agency officials have said the units were built as temporary housing, with many providing cramped living space, like kitchens in living rooms or hallways.
As I’ve previously written, temporary structures can become permanent; housing constructed mainly for emergency shelter can petrify into the residential landscape:
The temporary usually becomes the permanent, as our humble Quonset Huts show:
The Quonset hut of St. Patrick’s Catholic Church served as the center of Catholic life in Barrow until 1993. The church replaced the hut with a wood-framed structure.
With some adaptability, and possibly some easy-disassembly features, reusable shipping containers could represent the embryo house, giving people a nexus around which to establish a tenure and tenancy and gradually improve and personalize their homes.
Martie Rozkydal and her granddaughter, Julia Nesslage, beside the hut they painted together, 2003
After World War II,
Public housing in the
Like many a chief executive elsewhere around the globe, facing failing urban housing markets, Roosevelt decided to put the Federal government directly into the housing business, so the 1937 Act established a four-point structure:
1. Public ownership. Direct public ownership of the housing.
2. Local ownership. Even if funded from
3. Up-front grants, grant-based funding of all capital costs, therefore no debt.
4. Cheap rents, set at the cost of operations.
Later, when it became clear that the poorest of the poor could not afford even the cheap rents, two more planks were added:
5. Mean-tested rents, set at a percentage (initially 25%, today 30-32%) of each household’s income.
6. Federal operating subsidy to bring Net Operating Income back up to zero. (Later, realizing that zero NOI also precludes capital improvements, HUD added the concept of modernization funds.)
For the last forty years, these six elements have formed public housing’s operating paradigm.
Whitman today: recognizable to
In such a structure, and with public housing’s deliberate and unconscionable Federal under-funding over the last decade and a half, public housing has been starved for resources for which no amount of scrambling for short money could compensate.
[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]
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