Soon public housing projects may get a much-needed and long-awaited funding boost, but at a cost. The federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is currently reviewing NYCHA’s request for membership in the Section 8 Voluntary Transition Program, which would allow the authority to use some of its federal Section 8 funds flexibly. The tradeoff, affordable housing advocates say, is that if HUD accepts NYCHA’s proposal, 8,400 fewer housing subsidy vouchers would be made available to low-income New Yorkers who are on the waiting list for Section 8. Instead, the money would go to subsidize operating costs at 21 city and state public housing complexes, currently run by NYCHA without any help from the federal government.
Advocates say this solution will mean relief for public housing residents – at the expense of other low-income New Yorkers. If Section 8 funds are diverted, “the major losers would be the ... families on the Section 8 housing waiting list,” said Victor Bach, senior housing policy analyst at the Community Service Society of New York.
John Goering, a professor of public affairs and political science at the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College with 20 years' work experience at HUD under his belt, said, “In any pure sense nobody would want to rob Peter to pay Paul.” But he also said NYCHA is not immune to the high cost of maintaining buildings in New York City. The money, he said, has to come from somewhere.
The authority is faced with a bleak financial picture – one that's been years in the making due to rising costs coupled with large city, state and federal funding cuts. The approximate annual cost of operating public housing, according to the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO), is $1.5 billion, though at present about 15 percent is missing – the shortfall of $225 million. NYCHA has tried to close the gap by raising rents, selling vacant land to the city's Department of Housing Preservation and Development, using capital funds for operations, reducing services, and implementing a partial hiring freeze. But the IBO, even after taking those changes into account, projects a deficit of more than $44 million by this year’s end. (NYCHA’s fiscal year is the same as the calendar year.) In coming years, the IBO projects shortfalls of several times that amount.
These fiscal woes drove hundreds of public housing residents and NYCHA workers to a rally that filled City Hall Park on Oct. 4. With signs, chants and speeches, demonstrators told the city administration they want an annual budget line allocating $30 million toward the operation of city-owned public housing developments. One public housing resident, Hazel Noble of St. Mary's Park Houses in the Bronx, told the assembled, “I remember when my development used to be a clean well-kept place to raise my family." But, she said, a lot has changed since then. “The elevators seem to all be broken, the maintenance workers are scarce, but the rats are plentiful.”
