Rehab deferred is rehab denied: Part 3, future
By: David A. Smith
[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.]
In using the New York Times’s superficial examination of the Ingersoll and Whitman public housing properties in New York City to bring out the challenges facing not just these two large properties but the entire legacy public housing inventory, we have so far listed:
If only we could see them that clearly
Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman
1. Illegitimate birth. The properties were temporary housing turned over to
2. Decades of non-reinvestment. Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.
3. Warrant-of-habitability risk. A landlord that rents a substandard apartment is liable to the resident for damages, and housing authorities are uniquely vulnerable to such litigation.
4. Brass-ring capital planning mentality. Scarcity of funding prevented incremental improvements over time, leading to obsolete apartments needing a comprehensive and expensive overhaul.
5. Funding cuts after housing authorities’ plans were made. Funding promised at one time would be unpromised later, necessitating painful reductions in scope even as costs rose.
Ingersoll and Whitman face three additional challenges:
Getting out of these bond covenants is just the first problem
6. Resident-relation complexities
Public housing residents are government customers. Years and decades of observation have taught them to expect promises from their government, and then to be disappointed.
Anxiety remains high at Whitman and Ingersoll, tenants, elected officials and community advocates said, because unoccupied units have been used by drug dealers, vandals and squatters, and so many apartments have sat empty for so long.
Public housing residents have unusually powerful political voices:
They attributed the delay to … the complicated process of relocating hundreds of tenants with different housing needs at different times.
It’s always easier to renovate a property if the residents are moved safely off-site, but so powerful is the distrust and paranoia within the public housing community that most authorities have long ago acquiesced to the enormously more tortuous procedure of rehabbing with the residents in place, by shuttling them about on the same site:
The first tenants were relocated years before construction started. Residents could transfer to other apartments in their developments or elsewhere in the city, or receive a federal voucher that would allow them to move into subsidized private housing.
One would think that a generous offer – move out of a crumbling, decrepit apartment to other public housing apartments (that you approve), or receive a portable voucher and move to an apartment that will take a voucher. But wait, there’s more!
Lynn Godfrey, a Housing Authority spokeswoman, said the agency had tried to minimize the disruption, in part by paying moving expenses. “Given the huge mass undertaking and what we will accomplish at the end, the hope is that people will feel that it was well worth it,” she said.
All of this is entirely for the current residents’ benefit, but as we know no act of generosity goes unquestioned:
Yet skepticism — and a lingering suspicion — remains. “It looked more to me like they wanted to get the people in an exodus, to move them out of here as quickly as they could,” said Edward Carter, 76, a longtime tenant at Whitman.
Activists from Community Voices Heard,
That’s utter nonsense, of course. The property is encumbered by a permanent deed restriction that can be lifted only with HUD consent. Nevertheless, paranoia strikes deep, fostered by the enemies within. Here, for instance, is a comment about Ingersoll from August, 2007:
There is a HUGE rumor mill about anything regarding these projects (or any projects). A real estate broker trying to sell a desperately overpriced building across from projects told a friend that, “It was okay to speculate because the Jews had bought the projects and everyone was going to be moved out.” This is a freaking quote.
Seventeen years ago when my daughter was born, my hospital roommate lived in the Whitman houses and she told me – in all seriousness – that Chase was buying out tenants but they were trying to force people out and she knew people who refused to move whose windows had been shot out by the bank.
Another friend, who lives in projects out in
It’s a scary rumor mill anywhere else.
These rumors are ineradicable. As the Times notes:
An area on the rebound:
[The renovation plan] has fueled rumors, repeatedly denied by the agency, that low-income residents are being pushed out to convert the buildings into private luxury housing as
Where
Even long-delayed good news barely makes a dent:
Residents received some good news last month, when the Housing Authority held a ribbon-cutting for a $7 million community center on
7. Promises made before funding was rock-solid
Confronted with the brass-ring challenges mentioned before, NYCHA elected to proceed with some of its plan:
So far, 611 units have been renovated and are occupied, with construction under way in some buildings but not yet in others.
A 2006 report by the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., found that thousands of apartments at Whitman, Ingersoll and five other developments remained empty longer than necessary because the agency removed units from the rent rolls “well before it had a clear idea of how or when it planned to proceed” with construction projects.
Comptroller Thompson speaks after the fact
That’s easy to say after the fact; I have a more sympathetic view.
People are not numerate; they hear financial changes but have no tactile convertibility between the numbers and the changing scope and expectations. Thus, when NYCHA promised to do such-and-such provided so-much money came through, people heard only the dish, not the price.
The project was announced in 2002, and work began in 2006.
More than likely, when NYCHA started, it thought the money would be there.
The Housing Authority told residents in October 2004 that the renovations were expected to be completed in five years. This past April, officials said the project was instead scheduled for completion in February 2012.
When bad things happen to good economies, the result is scope shrinkage, something residents and the general public want not to hear.
I’m sure I don’t want to hear what you’re saying
Apartments awaiting renovations at both complexes have been vacant for an average of four years, according to the housing agency.
That’s what happens when funding is interrupted.
8. The pure-public ownership model
We know who should fund it; who should own it?
I’ve written extensively before about the essential housing authority, into which today’s housing authorities should evolve:
Effectively a publicly accountable charitable institution, a housing authority receives public subsidy, via the indirect collection agent of government — if it doesn’t, the system breaks down completely — and deploys it for the public benefit of affordable housing and healthy low-income communities. That’s the essential function:
We can expand this single goal into a short menu of activities:
Everything else is a technical function, which means it can be contracted, and if it can, it should.
Thus the essential housing authority is a holding company:
Yet today’s typical housing authority is anything but a holding company. Instead it’s an insular expanding universe unto itself.
I am a universe unto myself; everything is encompassed within me
The future essential housing authority will be a publicly accountable Mission Entrepreneurial Entity, one that can finance its own improvements, buy and sell its own properties, and contract with private entities to do things at which private developers excel – like construction:
The agency is spending more money to renovate the two low-income complexes than a developer recently spent building a $152 million condominium tower nearby known as Toren.
Much of this difference is explained by the handicaps under which NYCHA operates – an argument to contract out those functions. It’s much easier to avoid picking up unfunded mandates when you have restricted the government’s role to its essential functions, and outsourced the rest to the private sector.
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.
“This level of reinvestment suggests that NYCHA is committed to providing public housing resources for folks for generations to come,” Mr. Kelly said.
If anybody can move NYCHA out of its legacy of command-and-control functions toward its future essentiality, it’s Mike:
Seeing corners around the bend? Mike Kelly, new general manager of NYCHA
He has his work cut out for him:
Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman
1. Illegitimate birth. The properties were temporary housing turned over to
2. Decades of non-reinvestment. Our whole public housing delivery system is a Gordian knot catching the properties in a dependency trap: starved for resources.
3. Warrant-of-habitability risk. A landlord that rents a substandard apartment is liable to the resident for damages, and housing authorities are uniquely vulnerable to such litigation.
4. Brass-ring capital planning mentality. Scarcity of funding prevented incremental improvements over time, leading to obsolete apartments needing a comprehensive and expensive overhaul.
5. Funding cuts after housing authorities’ plans were made. Funding promised at one time would be unpromised later, necessitating painful reductions in scope even as costs rose.
6. Resident-relation complexities. Public housing residents’ fears about being relocated or gentrified cannot be placated except by rehabbing with them in place – adding to the costs.
7. Promises made before funding was rock-solid, leading to painful and poorly understood reductions in rehab scope.
8. The pure-public government ownership model, instead of reinventing into the essential housing authority.
Eight challenges are enough, aren’t they Magic 8-Ball?
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