Would you rather spend $138 and get 360 brand-new objects, or spend $130 and get 269 used objects?

What is this, asks the reader, a trick question? 

Not to the New York City Housing Authority, but perhaps to those whose willingness to believe and trust has been incinerated by many years of unfulfilled hopes.  As reported in the New York Times [February 6, 2010 – Ed.]:

Philadelphia tore down 21. Chicago leveled 79. Baltimore took down 21 as well, and when 6 of them came down in one day in 1995, it threw a parade.

IMPLOSION–The implosion of a large housing project in Newark in 1996. Many cities have moved toward smaller-scale housing that does not carry the stigma of despair and poverty.

Since the 1990s, public housing high-rise buildings have come tumbling down by the dozens across the country as cities replace them with smaller suburban-style homes that do not carry the stigma of looming urban despair and poverty.

Not just in America.  London has torn down some of its council high-rises.  Paris should tear down its.  Even as increasing density means cities must go vertical, going vertical is the prerogative of the wealthy.  The poorer you are, the more important it is for you to live on or near the ground floor – despite theoretical architects like Le Corbusier, the only people who can live happily in a high-rise are middle-income or rich.  Very low income high-rises become the slums inside.

New York City has long been the great exception, and red-brick towers still dominate the skyline from the Lower East Side to East Harlem, from Mott Haven, in the Bronx, to Bushwick, Brooklyn.

Dents in the sign notwithstanding, a wonderful community?

New York is exceptional for many reasons:

• It has long had the nation’s most capable large public housing authority
• As the cradle of apartment and high-rise living, it’s got a granite backbone uniquely suited to high-rises.
• NYCHA has been searching the sofa cushions (to scrape up extra operating money) and selling the family silver (disposing of non-core assets) to stave off the evil day.

Yet, as we saw only a few weeks ago, rehab deferred is rehab denied, and New York City, under the capable direction of Michael Kelly, has finally reached the inevitable conclusion for this property:

But now, for the first time in its 75-year history, the New York City Housing Authority wants to knock down an entire high-rise complex, Prospect Plaza in Brooklyn — a move that has surprised and angered a number of former tenants and advocates for low-income housing.

In the past decade, the authority has chosen to renovate rather than tear down its aging housing stock, often at great expense. Its decision to demolish Prospect Plaza was not the result of a sweeping policy shift, but of the failure of a renovation project that became bogged down in years of administrative, financial and legal problems.

The failure of Prospect Park’s HOPE VI renovation – a failure over a decade in the making – is a classic story.  Visions of sugar plums brought to the party far too  many cooks, all angling for their own piece of the pie.  As profiled in a story I discovered from City Limits, July 1, 2001, the inevitability effect doomed the Prospect Plaza HOPE VI transaction:

Here are a few snippets from the tragedy:

A consortium of community groups and churches, which joined with project tenants to jointly administer the funds, are now [July 1, 2001 – Ed.] duking it out for control of the money.

While they fought over the financial ice cream cone, it melted away.  Here’s a representative snapshot from a story so dreary I cannot bear to quote it:

Early on, when Abdur-Rahman Farrakhan became chairman of the PPDC, the group quickly descended into a nasty war of words. Farrakhan accuses other nonprofits–in particular the Brooklyn Interborough Community Network (BICNet)–of manipulating Prospect Plaza’s tenants in the hopes of getting large contracts for job training and technical assistance. “Everybody is looking to position themselves as best they can to be able to take advantage of this,” he says. Farrakhan says that Shelton Jefferson, who heads BICNet, “wanted a guaranteed contract and went to the tenants to stir shit up.”

Jefferson says he’s astonished by Farrakhan’s charge. “I doubt if Mr. Farrakhan would say something like that,” he says. “I have become involved in this project only because I was asked. I was asked by NYCHA to be an adviser to the tenants.”

For several years, NYCHA and its preferred developer, a very capable organization khown as Michaels Development, pursued HOPE VI, but that too collapsed.  Meanwhile – rehab deferred is rehab denied – the buildings became progressively more empty, more decrepit, and more expensive to renovate.

Prospect Plaza today: derelict and fenced off

Don’t let the windows fool you – the ground floors are boarded up

Prospect Plaza — three 12- to 15-story towers in Brownsville — is plagued by neither despair nor poverty: It has been vacant since 2003, when the last tenants were moved out with the promise they could return to refurbished apartments.

So why are we keeping an outmoded shell?  Nostalgia?  Or political expectation?  Or something simpler – like distrust of the alternative?

Agency officials say they want to tear down the 35-year-old buildings and erect new apartments in their place. Officials initially planned to leave the towers standing and reconfigure the apartments, by eliminating some units to create bigger living rooms and bathrooms, but those plans were scrapped by the authority’s new leadership because demolition made better financial sense.

It often does.  Buildings become obsolete, the more so when they fail to receive periodic upgrading and repositioning.

Ilene Popkin, the agency’s assistant deputy general manager for development, said the three buildings had deteriorated from vandalism and exposure to the elements, and were out of context with the neighborhood.

She said it would cost $481,000 to renovate each of the 269 apartments. Demolishing the structures and building 361 new units would cost $381,700 per unit.

If you do that arithmetic, renovation will cost $130 million and deliver 269 existing apartments; new-build will cost $138 million and deliver 361 – 92 more apartments for only $8 million more.

Mo’ money, mo’ housing

Moreover, because they’re new-build, with no resident relocation challenges, the construction will go faster, with far fewer unknowns or temporal risk factors.

The new apartments — including public and private housing, not only for the poor but also for low- and moderate-income families — are likely to be built in low-rise buildings.

Prospect Plaza originally included four towers housing 1,200 people.  [Not units – Ed.]

One was torn down in 2005; the plan was to use that space for a new community center, shops and additional housing. But today, the building’s old footprint is just a fenced-off lot.

Many public housing properties suffer from excessive density, particularly if the apartments are designed for families.  Babies have the annoying habit of growing up into toddlers, then into children, then into adolescents, and all these increasingly animate and rambunctious small people

That building was the first high-rise the authority demolished. In 2007, the agency also knocked down a number of two-story buildings as part of the redevelopment of the Markham Gardens complex on Staten Island.

The authority has completed the first two phases of its Prospect Plaza redevelopment plan, involving not the actual housing project itself but 37 two-family houses and 150 rental units in four-story town-house-style buildings that were constructed on nearby lots formerly owned by the city.

It’s a start – improving the neighborhood surrounding the public housing property.

The new Prospect Plaza: not a project but a neighborhood

The ribbon-cutting – always a happy moment

Several former residents of Prospect Plaza and groups that represent public housing tenants said they did not support the demolition, in part, because it was unclear to them that the authority intended to replace the old units with the same number of new public housing units.

While I understand about residents’ fear of losing apartments, there is a vast difference between losing a judicial unit – an apartment that is contractually or legally obligated to be affordable, irrespective of whether it is inhabitable – versus losing an actual unit. 

Do we count the unit as here or lost?

Even as the three towers sit vacant on Prospect Place near Saratoga Avenue, they continue to be a costly expense for the cash-strapped authority, which has paid a security firm $25,000 a month since 2005 to keep watch over the buildings.

At $25,000 a month for five years, that’s $1.5 million – which could have meant five more brand-new apartments after the rebuilding.  A large fraction of our public housing stock has decayed beyond salvageability, and – as we saw in Atlanta – it takes an executive with some courage to say so.

Agency officials have not decided how many of the new apartments will be public housing, but they said that former residents and community leaders would help make that determination.

“We are committed to being shoulder to shoulder with you,” the agency’s new general manager, Michael Kelly, told former tenants and others at a community meeting last week [Late January – Ed.] a few blocks from the vacant buildings.

Michael Kelly, general manager of the New York City Housing Authority, tried to reassure former tenants at a public meeting.

As I’ve previously posted, Mike Kelly is one of the good guys.  I trust him.

The cost of demolishing the towers and building the new apartments is estimated at $138 million. Part of the financing will come from a $21.4 million federal grant the authority was awarded in 1999 to revitalize Prospect Plaza, of which about $17 million remains.

The other $4 million got spent in the ill-fated Michaels HOPE VI effort.

At the meeting, Mr. Kelly said it was too early to say where the rest of the financing would come from. Agency documents describe the project as “mixed finance,” meaning it will be paid for with public and private dollars, with some of the money coming from the sale of federal low-income housing tax credits.

Doctoral candidate Laura Tach likes income mixing

Meaning income mixing, meaning LIHTC residents and so on.

The demolition, which must be approved by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, is planned for this fall, with construction scheduled to start in 2012.

If one cannot finance the renovation, one has no choice but a teardown and rebuild.

Preference for the new public housing units will go to former residents, many of whom were relocated to other public housing in Brooklyn.

Milton Bolton, 50, a former resident and the president of the still-intact Prospect Plaza Tenants Association, held up a thick draft of a 1998 application for the federal grant and said, “It’s hard to have trust.”

Milton Bolton, the tenant association president of Prospect Plaza, at the vacant buildings where he used to live.

There comes a time when buildings have to go somewhere to die; when that happens, it is a kindness to get rid of them.

Ms. Popkin and Mr. Kelly acknowledged “bumps along the road” for the project in the past, but they stressed their desire to rebuild the neighborhood. “I understand that folks here are frustrated,” Ms. Popkin said. “There is a new management at Nycha. We have a commitment to these towers. This is a top priority to move forward.”

Initially I was skeptical of Mr. Bolton’s distrust, until I found these paragraphs from nine years ago:

Even residents who say they’d welcome higher-income neighbors are running out of patience. Milton Bolton, the president of the Prospect Plaza Tenant Association and once a big booster of the plan, is now [July, 2001 – Ed.] ambivalent. He’s distressed that the social service programs are not established yet–particularly the homeowner training workshops, since he someday hopes to buy a house. Bolton, a soft-spoken bear of a man, sits in a straight-backed chair and bounces his 2-year-old son [The boy is now 11 – Ed.] on his lap as his seven other children scoot in and out of the room. “We welcome the changes,” he says. “We welcome the impact if it’s done right. But no matter what we do, it still feels like we’re fighting a losing battle.”

Bolton, who has put in countless hours on the Prospect Plaza deal, believes that he will not be allowed to return to the project once the renovations are complete. He has been unemployed for a while and admits that there have been many times that he has fallen behind in his rent. He’s even been put on probation for the problem. “What they’re telling me is once I leave, I’m not coming back,” he says. “We just have to hope they bring at least some of the people back.”

I sometimes forget that those residents who have the most time to devote to public housing advocacy may be those who have the fewest economic resources.  I respect and admire Mr. Bolton’s patience and commitment in the face of uncertainty and disappointment.

Bolton keeps hoping

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[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 New York by the Navy after World War II.

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:

New Orleans public housing tenants: maybe wrong, never silent

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, New York City

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 Coney Island repeated the same rumor – almost word for word – several years later about the buildings she resides in.

It’s a scary rumor mill anywhere else.

These rumors are ineradicable.  As the Times notes:

An area on the rebound: Fort Greene, Brooklyn

[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 Fort Greene gentrifies.

Where Fort Greene’s upwardly mobile want to live

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 Myrtle Avenue. It had been expected to open in 2004.

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 New York by the Navy after World War II.

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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[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

Yesterday we visited Ingersoll and Whitman Houses, two large public housing properties in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood, where the New York Times showed the obligatory photographs of empty apartments and broken windows before giving an assemblyman a platform to spout complaints about the invisible ‘administrative management’ that makes such a convenient whipping boy.

As an elected official, I wield the flail on whom I choose

Yet, overlooked by the Times and by the fulminating assemblyman, Ingersoll/ Whitman are emblematic of the challenges facing US public housing, which go far beyond one bureaucrat, one property, one city, or even one era. 

Yesterday we identified:

Challenges facing Ingersoll/ Whitman

1. Illegitimate birth.  The properties were temporary housing turned over to New York by the Navy after World War II.

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.

These two are bad enough; what follows makes it even more difficult.

More problems for a pure-public owner

3.         Warrant-of-habitability requirements

While more than 130,000 families are on the waiting list for a city public housing apartment, hundreds of units at the Ingersoll Houses and the adjacent Whitman Houses are vacant — 923 out of nearly 3,500 units, according to the landlord, the New York City Housing Authority, the city’s public housing agency.

Obviously, this is a terrible shame, but for many of these apartments, NYCHA has done the right thing, in view of the warrant of habitability risk.  Simply stated, in New York:

Tenants are entitled to a livable, safe and sanitary apartment. Lease provisions inconsistent with this right are illegal. Failure to provide heat or hot water on a regular basis, or to rid an apartment of insect infestation are examples of a violation of this warranty.  (Real Property Law §235-b)

A vacancy at Ingersoll

If a landlord breaches the warranty, the tenant may sue for a rent reduction. The tenant may also withhold rent, but in response, the landlord may sue the tenant for non-payment of rent. In such a case, the tenant may counter sue for breach of the warranty.

Actually, for landlords it’s worse than this; breach of the warrant of habitability allows enterprising public-interest lawyers to sue for damages.  Housing authorities are a sitting duck defendant – they cannot leave, they cannot file bankruptcy (they’re an arm of the city), they cannot plead insolvency.  NYCHA is confronted with apartments like these:

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.

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. The light in the kitchen still worked.

An apartment that suffers too much interior damage goes past the point of operational reparability, known in the lingo as a down unit.  It has to be secured, and often it is cannibalized – fixtures removed to repair other apartments.  With half a century of under-maintenance, it would be surprising if NYCHA didn’t have a significant inventory of down units.

NYCHA’s Chelsea-Elliott housing property

That leads to …

4.         Brass-ring capital planning mentality

When a public housing property’s problems compound beyond its ability to solve them, the housing authority pursues a comprehensive revitalization: one massive upgrade of everything, all at once:

Agency officials defended their handling of the renovations and their oversight of the vacant units, and described the work as the largest public-housing renovation project in the country.

They attributed the delay to the broad scope of the project, which has included combining some apartments in developments that are more than sixty years old ….

)

More of Roosevelt’s legacy: Archdale Village, Boston

Brass-ring thinking is imprinted in public housing authorities because of their dependency schema.  Public housing has no replacement reserve; its properties generate no positive cash flow (that’s why it needs operating subsidy).  It has no ability to borrow long-term and finance improvements.  Thus it is operating sixty-year-old high-rise buildings.  Built before we worried about lead-based paint, much less asbestos, radon, or mold.  Built before broadband, before the personal computer, before television even.  Public housing has not kept up with the evolving modern home.  These properties have missed a half-century’s worth of trends in affordable housing.  Electrical circuitry is beyond obsolete; so too plumbing and piping.  

Now comes the magic moment when just possibly we might get funding.  We have to do everything at once: the physical reconfiguration, the upgrades, the operational improvements. 

The original renovation plans included improving elevator service, adding floors to buildings and reconfiguring some apartments to add space by reducing the number of units per floor.

I knew I’d grasp it eventually

The scope expands, and with it the cost, and the timing, and the complexity:

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. The total cost has now reached $248 million, nearly triple the $83 million the agency said it would cost in 2004.

Once one has committed to a complete repositioning, not just fixing some down units, arises the next challenge: residents in place.

5.         Funding cuts after housing authorities made plans

Because of their dependency schema, housing authorities basically have no money of their own. 

How the other half lives: Riis Houses, New York City

Anything they need for large-scale upgrading or renovation must come from Uncle Sugar, which exercises the sovereign’s prerogative of insisting on approving the plans in detail.  That’s a challenge because gut rehab of occupied apartments is much more complicated than building new:

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.

Partly this is due to governmental self-imposed restrictions like union rules, Davis-bacon, and prevailing wage.  It’s also because of protracted delays:

The majority [of the vacant units – Ed.] are unoccupied because of a costly, long-delayed modernization project that has forced ['Caused' is more likely – Ed.] hundreds of tenants to relocate.

I expect that, in anticipation of funding – which was probably promised – NYCHA in turn made promises to residents and began prepping the buildings for renovation by relocating residents on turnover.

Who promises more wins … doesn’t he?

The original designs were changed because of a lack of financing, and the plan to add floors was dropped.

Each time one redoes the design, some sunk costs become unrecoverable, and the overall project cost expands.

Some non-recoverable costs there …

[Continued tomorrow in Part 3.]

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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: Apartment 11D was vacant. So was 1E — insulation covered the door’s missing peephole — and at least two dozen other apartments in the 11-story building at the Ingersoll Houses in Fort Greene.

 “This is a classic case of administrative mismanagement,” said Assemblyman Joseph R. Lentol of Brooklyn. “It’s really pathetic when you think about how long this has taken and how administratively they could have done it better.”

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 Fort Greene, Brooklyn

Like many New York City public housing properties, Ingersoll is large:

Raymond V. Ingersoll Houses in Brooklyn has 20 buildings, 6 and 11-stories tall on 22.9-acres with 1,802 apartments housing some 4,532 residents. Completed February 24, 1944, it is bordered by Park and Myrtle Avenues, Saint Edward’s and Prince Streets.

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 Brooklyn College campus, Brooklyn Civic Center site, and better roads and parkways linking Brooklyn to the other boroughs. He was a member of the State Commission which revised tenement and housing laws in 1928-29. Ingersoll strongly advocated non-partisan municipal government. He once wrote: “The dreamer dies, but never dies the dream.” Ingersoll Houses is in Brooklyn.

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 Brooklyn.

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 Brooklyn looked like when Ingersoll and Whitman were being developed

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.

New York City family, 1944; the little boy at lower left grew up into …

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, New York City adopted rent control as a ‘temporary emergency’ measure, and it remains today, a harmful anachronism that I’ve analyzed and criticized in many other posts.  Public housing’s funding structure is equally anachronistic, as I detailed at length in public housing’s dependency trap:

Public housing in the United States was established in the 1937 National Housing Act. Way back then, there were no state housing finance agencies, no GSEs, no FHA mortgage insurance, no specialized business of affordable housing, virtually no mission-oriented sponsors. Back then, affordable housing meant slums, rooming houses, or tenements.

Chicago, 1910

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 Washington, each property to be owned by local housing authorities.

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 Roosevelt

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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[Continued from yesterday's Part 2 and the previous Part 1.]

“Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.”

– Oscar Wilde

In the first two parts of this post, we encountered (via a Los Angeles Times article) Los Angeles‘ Jordan Downs public housing property, and the ambitious (if sketchy and idealistic) plans for its comprehensive redevelopment, a plan that requires resident input and consent.  Understandably, like their counterparts in Mumbai’s Dharavi, who squat over equally well-located land that is proposed to be an equally inspiring and revolutionary urban redevelopment, they are skeptical.  Even distrustful.

Selling the new vision: is you is or is you ain’t buying?

And it is the job of John King II, executive director of the Housing Authority of the CIty of Los Angeles, to earn their trust:

“Until they see it, it’s hard to get people to trust,” he said. “We’re trying to build that by delivering on what we say.”

Because the solution is its salesware, the best proof will be the development itself, fully completed, and that lies in the future, where it is unknowable.  So the planners are doing the next best thing – taking them to meet their peers in other properties:

Planners have worked hard to generate tenants’ support. They took a team of locals on a national tour of similar redevelopment projects –

Peer-to-peer works.  Not just the properties – the people.  Actually, it’s the people who are more important, because they have been through the experience, and they know what the Jordan Downs residents do not.  If the Jordan Downs steering committee is wise, it will make peer-to-peer exchange not a isolated event, but an integral ongoing process.  If they’re really smart, they’ll fund these exchanges in the project budget, and encourage peer-to-peer interactions with no one else present.  Get out of the way.

Community Barber.  Resident Andre Powns gives a haircut to his son Alijah, 3.

There’s an essential element of trust that the project leaders need to show their residents.  Not the money, not the trips, but the chance to talk to peers while no one else is watching.

– and have offered free lunches for tenants who sit through the marathon presentations and focus-group sessions.

SDI leadership, Colombo, Sri Lanka

Wrong dynamic: free lunches and marathon presentations and focus groups aren’t what builds trust.  Trust builds trust.

Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles), whose district includes Watts, has promised to protect residents’ interests, and they trust her. She and Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa plan to meet today with residents at Jordan Downs.

Trust can be misplaced when public-choice risk is involved.  But then, I’m naturally skeptical.  A better peer is someone who’s traveled the same roads you have. 

They count on ambassadors such as Richard Alford, who lives a few blocks away but grew up in Jordan Downs; his grandmother, aunts and sisters still live in the projects. He visited Seattle, Chicago, Portland, Ore., and Atlanta with the team of architects designing the project.

“I whip out my pictures and [say] ‘Wouldn’t you like to get brand new pipes?’ ” he said.

Trust is not won by weight of evidence.  Trust is won by immediacy, and reliability of the messenger.

“Touch my wound”

Trust requires vocalization; fear hides in silence.

He tries to push tenants to ask for what they want, and assures them they won’t be shipped out to Lancaster and forgotten. “I tell them I’ve seen it with my own eyes.”

Though Lancaster is not the end of the world – I’ve been there, and my company handled the recapitalization of a property there – it is on the far side of the San Gabriel mountains. 

85 miles, 3 hours 10 minutes in traffic, a lifetime in experience

A long way from the neighborhood.

“Toto, I think we’re not in the ‘hood any more”

Communities are cryptobiotica – the web of living people stronger than the web of physical structures.  Disperse them like dandelion seeds and they may be new people, but they will not be the same community.

But even its biggest cheerleaders worry that the project might be undone by its homegrown web of challenges.

A community develops its own ethos, and that ethos becomes stronger even as the physical community becomes more isolated.  The ethos may be strong – and it may resist improvement.

“Jordan Downs is the most extreme case I’ve seen, by a long shot,” said San Francisco architect Daniel Solomon, who heads the project’s planning team and has redeveloped other city projects.
“The project’s size, the sense of isolation, the horrible statistics about crime and public health . . . the sense of entrapment people feel there,” Solomon said, ticking off the consequences of a “history of abandonment” in South L.A.

We are rational creatures who make sense of the world around us.  The world around Jordan Downs forgot Jordan Downs, dumped its poor there, left them to fend as best they could. 

High School Graduates.  Michael Jerod Adams, 17, hugs fellow graduate Vanna Briattany Colbert after high school graduation ceremonies at the housing project. The graduation was held for the Los Angeles Computer Science Academy at Jordan Downs.

The world didn’t necessarily mean to do them harm; harm just happened.  That makes it no less harmful.

To a stranger, Jordan Downs feels like a world unto itself. Stand in almost any spot on the 50-acre property and you see row after row of identical two-story buildings that look like barracks, distinguishable only by an occasional rosebush near a front door or the size of shirts on clotheslines crisscrossing every backyard.

A barracks it was, and a barrack it is … just a different group of conscripts

Right now, ugly though it may be, Jordan Downs is low-density: only fourteen apartments to the acre.  That is proposed to triple, plus there will be additional non-housing uses.  The place, when transformed, will be unrecognizable; all traces of the old Jordan Downs will have vanished.

If it happens.  Count the recursive cycles of deprivation and poverty that block the residents’ trust.

I believe only what I can prove

1.  Failure is comfortable because it is familiar

But the bunkered uniformity that ties down residents also gives some comfort; there’s less shame being out of work or on welfare when almost everyone around you is as well.

If everyone fails, then my failure is no failure, and we can all be comfortable; indeed, the only risk is in trying.

No HOPE in sight

2.  Trusting only those one knows

“There’s an amazing sense of community there, and they don’t want that dismantled,” Solomon said. “These are their homies, and they cannot imagine life without them.”

If no one I do not know has helped me, then I can trust only those I know.

And I don’t want to know you

3.  Fearing those who are successful

They also cannot imagine life alongside the middle-class families the project plans to lure.

That they cannot is the most severe indictment of public housing imaginable.  People so isolated they cannot imagine themselves living with others.  For the redevelopment to succeed, the developers will have to enable people to change what they expect to see.

“Upscale people are not going to move over here, to the heart of the ghetto,” said Smith, of Parolees for Change. “They’ll be, like: ‘Where are the gas stations? Who are all these dudes hanging around? Why did that guy take off with my car?’ “

Gas stations can be brought.  Stores can be added.  People will come if the community is comprehensively transformed, including its policing.  Such strategies have worked in Atlanta; they’ve worked in Boston.

How do you overcome the unvoiced belief, Yeah, but it’ll never happen here?

Public housing: before, Mission Hill being demolished

Public housing: after, Mission Main as built

4.  Failure shrinks horizons

At the meeting last month, one resident panned what planners figured would be a welcome draw: new businesses on-site and more frequent bus service. “Don’t you want a grocery store closer to Jordan Downs?” asked the architect.

Genevia Penny shrugged him off. The Food 4 Less is close enough, she said, and a 20-minute wait for the bus is no trouble.

Close enough for the housing project?

Prisoners kept in long confinement are psychologically manipulated by offering them hope of imminent release … they snatching it away at the last moment.  Disappointment is so powerful we build up defenses against hope, and those defenses create the death of hope.

A trip to the market is a good reason to get dressed and go out; the bus stop is a good place to catch up on neighborhood gossip.

Talk about your rationalizations.

“They want to make it so we don’t get out in the world,” Penny complained. “What’s the senior citizens like me supposed to do — just sit around and watch TV?”

Self-destructive … but self-reinforcing.

Born of the public housing: Grape Street Crips, project in the background

5.  The community self-polices … because no one else does

When force passes for law

Smith took Solomon on a walking tour of the projects — an eye-opener for the architect, who realized “they think we have a Pollyannaish view of their lives.” And “they” are right.

“Their daily experiences are so different from what anybody who doesn’t live in that environment can imagine,” Solomon said, recounting his introduction to a place where nobody blinks when the front-office receptionist explains that she is late because her seven-year-old son woke up to a dead body on their front step.

All the world’s landscape character and typologies will not change that. 

Policing has to start now.

And it takes force

6.  Trust requires the powerful to give first

At a community meeting last month, a middle-aged Latino man limped to the microphone, leaning on a walker, to present the suggestions from his group of neighbors.

“I know we can’t demand anything,” he said, his voice rising over the interpreter translating his Spanish. “But I would like to make a request. We have a lot of vandalism in the area, and we are devastated by that. So we would like to have an inspector. Right now. Today.” He pounded the handle of his walker, and the women and children at the table behind him applauded.

A fair idea.  One I hope the designers immediately implemented.  I wonder if they did.

I trust you means that I risk letting you hurt me even when I cannot retaliate.  You are trustworthy when, presented with that opportunity, instead of hurting me, you help me – usually at risk to yourself.

But if some sentiments have surprised the consultants, some suggestions have surprised the residents.

What about a health club, where elderly residents could exercise, one of the consultants offered. Or a computer center, where senior citizens could learn to use technology?

Penny stared at her with raised eyebrows, uncharacteristically silent. Twenty-four years in the projects and she had yet to consider all of its possibilities.

Community center, Cement Factory redevelopment, Cape Town

Will Jordan Downs make it?  Will the residents come to trust?  Will those they trust tale critical risks in return?

Another Oscar Wilde quote

A phrase quoted to me by my friend Andrea Titterington, who for the last several years has been building trust in Liverpool’s Anfield neighborhood as she struggles to secure all the approvals, and all the funding, for a state-of-the-art new stadium complex:

Nothing about us

without us

is for us.

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