Making Public Housing Public

There’s an invisible wall around much of the public housing in New York. To approach one of the larger public housing projects is to confront a different world. Suddenly the city's trademark lively street scene vanishes, replaced by a forest of boxy red brick high rises.

Public housing’s isolation from the economic and community life around it can contribute to problems ranging from crime to long-term unemployment, according to stacks of reports from think tanks and housing advocates. Even the secretary of the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, Shaun Donovan, says projects create “whole neighborhoods of concentrated poverty and segregation."

Local housing experts are beginning to use the same language. While HUD’s Donovan – the former NYC housing chief – speaks of “building a geography of opportunity,” a recent report from the Pratt Center for Community Development is titled “Public Housing in New York City: Building Communities of Opportunity.”

The report calls for stronger job training programs, links to mass transit, and new building on under-utilized land under the control of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA). “This will start chipping away at public housing’s isolation,” says Alyssa Katz, the report’s editor (and a former editor of City Limits). “There is a whole lot more that the Bloomberg Administration can do.”

The recommendations in “Communities of Opportunity” can probably be achieved without the controversy and expense caused by public housing demolition and redevelopments in other cities, but it’s unclear whether the recommended expansions of existing programs will be enough to break the isolation of our public housing.

Warehousing the poor

Many experts now claim that housing too many needy families too close together without enough services creates islands of deprivation — what Brookings Institute researcher Bruce Katz has called “warehouses for the very poor.”

This critique is a reversal of what was once a conscious policy choice. Advocates once pressed the government to use public housing to help the people who needed it most, and public housing is still the “housing of last resort” for many families, according to Katz.

In New York City, public housing tends to be located in the poorest neighborhoods, and almost half of NYCHA residents are living in poverty, earning less than $22,050 a year for a family of four. The report points out the irony that: “A disproportionate number of the New Yorkers who could benefit most from aid in securing such supports as job training, employment, and reliable public transportation live in complexes that are isolated from those opportunities.”

To bring residents earning a wider mix of incomes into its public housing, the housing authority has created a “working families” preference. Today, NYCHA provides apartments to new tenants making up to 80 percent of area median income (for a family of four, that's an income of $61,450 a year). Once tenants are in place, they can make more than that.

But this raises other concerns. “My sense is that the study is informed, like many others today, by a wish to eliminate remaining pockets of poverty in New York so that we will live in a 'perfect' city,” says Nicholas Dagen Bloom, author of Public Housing That Worked. “NYCHA projects are one of the few elements in the city that keep Manhattan and Brooklyn diverse, interesting places,” says Bloom, “as well as providing a source of workers in the service industry.”