Housing Boss: Big Deficits Remain

Michael Kelly wants to break the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) out of its shell by linking with other government agencies and local nonprofits, building on under-used NYCHA land, and hopefully balancing the budget. Before he took over as general manager of NYCHA in October, Kelly was chief of public housing authorities in San Francisco, New Orleans, and Washington, D.C.

How is NYCHA different from other housing authorities where you have worked?

It's the largest in the country by far… Also, the decay that occurred in much of the public housing throughout the nation through the 80s and 90s did not happen here.   In New York, for the most part, the public housing is the same kind of housing that is built for moderate-income and market-rate housing. The style itself is a New York City style, whereas across the country a lot of this stuff was built as temporary World War II military housing that was converted over to public housing control, or it was built with really substandard materials or substandard design, which contributed to its distress.   

The classic model of public housing redevelopment practiced in many other cities tears down a public housing site and replaces it with, say, one third affordable homeownership and two thirds various kinds of affordable rental housing. Are there barriers to doing that here?

I don't know if it's barriers so much as it is a real commitment to replacing the affordable rental housing units that were on the site. Once you've established that principle, the question is how much of that other stock can the site support?   

So NYCHA is committed to one-to-one replacement of any existing public housing demolished in redevelopment, so that no affordable housing is lost?

I think it is. Never say never, but particularly with regard to demolition of existing structures, I think my board of commissioners would want that question answered.   

The formal rules for federal public housing redevelopment also had a commitment to lowering the density of public housing projects. How does that apply in New York City?

It's dangerous to get into strong generalizations… but just the opposite. I think that we would be looking for infill opportunities [that could add new density]… If we were to have projects that would reintegrate the street grid within one of our larger sites, then development could very well happen along either side of that newly-created street that would have the kind of neighborhood amenities—that folks would come into our property to get their dry cleaning done or buy a sandwich.

Last month NYCHA closed a deal with HUD that will provide new funding to thousands of public housing apartments built by the city and state. These apartments have received no city or state funding for years, so that NYCHA has been stuck paying for them, including the cost of rent subsidies for residents and maintaining the buildings.    

I don't know if 'stuck' is the right word… They were provided as a resource to NYCHA in the best of spirits when they were built. [But over time] the city and the state's local resources were no longer able to operate and modernize these sites.