Richard Dragos, the superintendent of Grant Houses in Harlem, and Demetrice Gadson, the deputy director of the Manhattan management department of the New York City Housing Authority, were in tow as several dozen residents and members of Community Voices Heard (CVH) narrated a tour for City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Councilmembers Robert Jackson of Harlem and Melissa Mark-Viverito of East Harlem. The point was to show Quinn the poor living conditions suffered by too many at NYCHA’s 178,489 apartments, an opportunity sought by CVH for more than a year.
Caught between residents’ complaints and politicians’ fluctuating levels of support, NYCHA employees – like Dragos, who guides maintenance for all 1,940 apartments at Grant – grapple with the effects of NYCHA’s massive underfunding every day. “The elevators are fixed whenever we get a call,” he maintained stoically outside of 3150 Broadway on July 22. Yet residents hooted at the irony that just as the tour approached that building, the elevator alarm bell rang an alert that someone was stuck.
The chance to show Quinn the outside and inside of Grant, after doing the same at Jefferson Houses in East Harlem, came at a moment of new possibility for NYCHA – the first in a while. The authority is busy spending $423 million of federal stimulus money on “shovel-ready” capital projects around the five boroughs. The funds are intended not only to fill longstanding capital needs, but to put unemployed NYCHA residents to work in the process.
And, in recognition of the need to better fund the authority’s ongoing operating costs as well – addressing the $137 million operating deficit for 2010 – a growing list of elected officials in the State Senate, Assembly and City Council have signed on as supporters of the Save Our Underfunded NYCHA Developments (SOUND) Housing Campaign. They promise to push hard in the next budget rounds for additional millions in investment that officials have chosen to withhold in recent years – $30 million from the city and $64 million from the state. The SOUND campaign, led by Senator Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn and Assemblyman Brian Kavanagh of Manhattan, also asks the city to stop charging NYCHA more than $70 million annually in PILOTs (payments in lieu of taxes) for police and sanitation services.
Indeed, “full funding for public housing in all future budgets” was one of CVH’s top demands of public officials on the tour. That addresses the everyday operating costs of running NYCHA, which have been starved in recent years. The other is creation of an “oversight committee to track projects being funded by stimulus funds.” Those projects come from the capital budget for larger construction projects, for which funding also has declined precipitously.
