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Despite avoiding the woes that plagued public housing elsewhere, NYCHA hasn't been so lucky as to escape the dollars-and-cents reality of successive funding cuts. A raft of cost-cutting measures including layoffs, service cuts, land sales—even the landmark and controversial plan to use Section 8 vouchers to fund public housing—have narrowed but not closed the massive budget gap.

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Housing Boss: Big Deficits Remain 04.12.10

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Jarrett Murphy
Jarrett Murphy
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NYCHA may have made its own job harder by mismanaging its capital plan, a crucial element of its hopes for survival. As City Limits reported last month, an initiative to partly privatize the authority's capital management has been plagued by cost overruns and leadership lapses. Rising construction prices and the use of more union labor, which earns higher (and, the unions argue, fairer) wages, have also raised costs. Altogether, it means that that NYCHA might be able to complete only 25 percent of the roof, brick, electric, interior and other repairs that it promised.

So the authority has to consider even more drastic steps to make ends meet. NYCHA consistently denies it would consider selling any of its projects (some of which are in areas with high development potential), but that is exactly what a chorus of voices on the right want it to do—with some cheering "good riddance," and gentler voices arguing that only a smaller NYCHA can survive. "Ultimately, it's too late for public housing. Most public housing is going to come down," says the Manhattan Institute's Julia Vitullo-Martin, one vocal proponent of selling off part of NYCHA to save the rest. "You've just got to face facts on these things. That's the way it is."

Even if NYCHA avoids that fate, public housing is sure to change in other ways as NYCHA's admissions preferences—which favor people with moderate incomes over the very poor—alter the social makeup of the projects.

As a candidate, President Obama vowed to restore the full federal operating subsidy for public housing. And NYCHA has also lobbied for the new stimulus bill to include new capital funding for rebuilding public housing— in New York City alone, dozens of buildings are more than 50 years old, and there are $6 billion in backlogged repairs. The arrival of former city housing commissioner Shaun Donovan at the helm of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which oversees public housing, signals that New York's needs should at least receive a friendly hearing.

But hopes for help from Washington are constrained by a self-reinforcing political reality: As the wrecking ball knocked down projects in Chicago, Atlanta, New Orleans and elsewhere in recent decades, the number of constituents for public housing shrank. "New York City is becoming more and more different from every city in the country," says NYCHA General Manager Doug Apple. "That makes it really more challenging in Washington because every other city in this country has actually demolished public housing, eliminated public housing and changed public housing."

- Jarrett Murphy