Making Public Housing Public

Losing the lead?

In recent decades, New York’s public housing remained “viable,” in the words of the Pratt report, while other cities were plagued with notorious projects like Orchard Park in Boston, which was so decayed and crime-ridden that by the 1990s hundreds of its apartments stood empty because potential residents refused to move in, even after waiting for years on Boston’s public housing waiting list.

The 774 public housing apartments at Orchard Park have now been torn down and rebuilt under the federal HOPE VI program. The new project has fewer units — just 446 public housing apartments mixed in with 45 for-sale homes spread over a larger site. But a decade later, they remain fully occupied and crime is low: In 2008 the public housing property received a national MetLife Foundation Community-Police Partnership Award.

Although that story has been repeated across the country in practically every major U.S. city and the HOPE VI program has handed out more the $6 billion in grants to more than 600 projects, New York's housing authority has started only three HOPE VI developments. That's because advocates and city officials are unwilling to support any policy that cuts the number of public housing apartments.

“No one is talking about reducing the number of units,” says Katz, from Pratt.

However, many housing authorities have redeveloped public housing into mixed income housing and still replaced all the original public housing apartments, usually by expanding the development site into nearby blocks — an expensive proposition in much of New York.

In 2005, the city announced plans to build 6,000 new units of housing on vacant or under-utilized housing authority land, building around existing public housing, and the Pratt report includes several recommendations to improve and codify the process of redevelopment, in particular to make sure that the needs of local residents around these redevelopments are respected.