BY YANNIC RACK | A broken and non-transparent housing authority is to blame for the city’s shortcomings on affordable accommodations, according to city comptroller Scott Stringer.
Last week, Stringer, whose office has audited the NYC Housing Authority (NYCHA) six times in the past two years, called once again for drastic reforms to get New York’s neglected housing projects back on track.
“The reason I’m focusing on NYCHA is this is where the poor people live, and if we let NYCHA collapse then we are going to hurt a lot of great New Yorkers who live in public housing, who will never have a chance. Their kids will never have a chance,” he said in an interview last Fri., Oct. 2. “I’m in a position now where I can do something about it.”
Stringer spoke with the editors of NYC Community Media (this newspaper’s parent group) and its sister publications from Community News Group in our Brooklyn office, where he also discussed the city’s problems in taking care of its homeless population, the need for cooperation between Albany and City Hall when it comes to the MTA’s funding, and what the comptroller’s office can do to help failing schools.
The previous day, Stringer gave public testimony at a joint hearing before the City Council Committees on Public Housing and Contracts. The goal of the hearing was to examine the need for more contracting accountability and general transparency at NYCHA in light of leaking roofs at the Martin Luther King Jr. Towers development on Lenox Ave. in Harlem.
Stringer used the opportunity to call for fundamental reform to the authority, one that would move away from the “old recycled proposals from mayors past,” which he accused NYCHA of still pursuing.
“NYCHA has become a collection of broken windows, mold and roofs that never get fixed, like at King Houses,” he said at the hearing. “Year after year, we get plan after plan, promising on paper how the agency is going to improve. But over and over, those promises are broken.”
Earlier this year, the agency unveiled NextGen, its latest plan to move the authority from the brink of fiscal catastrophe to a $230 million budgetary surplus over the next decade, as Chelsea Now reported in July.
But according to Stringer, the litany of problems at NYCHA include the agency’s failure to secure nearly $700 million in federal funds, a broken inventory system, and the mismanagement of vacant apartments — with units kept off the rolls for years, including 80 apartments that have stood vacant for more than a decade, and 161 that were vacant for three to 10 years.
In addition, the authority currently has a backlog of 55,000 maintenance and repair requests, and takes 370 days on average to fix critical safety violations, according to Stringer’s audits. The Elliott-Chelsea Houses (btw. W. 25th & 27th Sts., 9th & 10th Aves.) and Fulton Houses (btw. W. 16th & 18th Sts., 9th & 10th Aves.), for example, currently have around 200 backlogged work orders each, as well as 47 outstanding building violations between them. Stringer also argued that the plan’s 26 strategies were mostly recycled from previous proposals. “There’s only six new proposals, so stop calling it NextGen,” he said on Oct. 2. “Let’s try to figure out ‘RealityGen.’ What we have to do with NYCHA, if it’s going to move forward, we have to bring some light to the NYCHA budgeting process.”
The comptroller’s suggestions for reform would require NYCHA to follow the same budgeting rules as every other agency, including issuing quarterly reports and creating a four-year financial plan.
He would also make the authority release more information on maintenance requests and repair records, as well as its physical needs assessment, akin to an X-ray of every building that shows where roofs, boilers and other systems need to be fixed.
Back in July, Stringer first suggested NYCHAStat, a tool for viewing building-by building breakdowns of repair data that would track work orders online and in real time.
The system is modeled on the NYPD’s accountability process, CompStat (short for Computer Statistics), and ClaimStat, which is used by the comptroller’s office.
“You need to have transparency to hold management accountable. Imagine CompStat without data. Imagine ClaimStat without data,” he said.
At the city council hearing, he also criticized one of the authority’s more recent efforts towards transparency, the MyNYCHA app, which lets users track their own work orders, but not see the bigger picture within their own building.
Crediting Councilmember Ritchie Torres with the idea, he also called for integrating NYCHA’s contract information into Checkbook, an online transparency tool that has recorded the city’s day-to-day spending on a dedicated website since 2010.
Although the system already includes exchanges of money between NYCHA and other city agencies, data on how it spends the vast bulk of its funding is still missing.
A spokesperson for NYCHA responded to the allegations via email, saying that the authority was currently reviewing the comptroller’s report. “In its first hundred days, NextGen NYCHA has made real, meaningful progress in reforming the way NYCHA does business,” the spokesperson said. “Developed with the input of hundreds of stakeholders and residents, NextGen is the most inclusive plan in city history to tackle the critical needs in public housing head on.”
But Stringer at least sees the potential for much more transparency, and also hinted at further audits of the authority in the future. “NYCHA can’t be held to a standard if we can’t find out what they’re doing,” he said. “No chair of NYCHA has ever said ‘Let’s take this to the finish line, I’m throwing it all open for the world to see.’ And I think we have to do that.”
