Work In Progress: Residents Get More NYCHA Jobs

Harlem — Jerome Mosley, a resident of the Thomas Jefferson Houses in Harlem, was unemployed and wanted to get work in construction—which would offer much better pay than the retail management job he had lost a year earlier. Despite filling out dozens of employment applications, he was reaching dead ends. Then in May he enrolled in the Bloomberg administration's Jobs Plus program, where he heard about a New York City Housing Authority training program open to public housing residents like him. After taking a test and an interview, Mosley was chosen for NYCHA's selective job training program.

After 40 hours of hands-on experience in painting and 125 hours of training in carpentry and scaffolding, Mosley obtained his U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) certification and was recently hired for a roofing project for NYCHA through a private contractor, GTS Construction. He has another project lined up in asbestos abatement which he plans to start in February. Both projects pay $40.50 an hour for 38 to 40 hours a week.

"I'm ecstatic," Mosley says. "Not only am I working, but I'm learning."

Of the six people working on his current project, Mosley is the only NYCHA resident. Still, it is safe to say that Mosley's story, though still rare among NYCHA residents, would probably not have happened a year ago. While NYCHA has for years offered apprenticeship programs, it was only in September that it offered the first of its Resident Training Academies. Mosley was one of 150 residents who benefited from that Robin Hood Foundation-sponsored program, which helped participants obtain the OSHA card that is required for most construction jobs.

NYCHA isn't providing these opportunities to residents solely on its own volition. Technically, they're required by federal law. Section 3 of the 1968 Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Act created the goal of employing public housing residents on public housing development projects. The policy was amended in 1997 to state that housing authorities should fill at least 30 percent of their full-time jobs with public housing residents—"to the greatest extent possible." This language gives a lot of wiggle room and was rarely enforced by HUD, so public housing authorities, including NYCHA, rarely complied. And even when jobs were available, one of the largest complaints by NYCHA residents about Section 3 compliance has been that there isn't enough training to make residents eligible for those jobs.

But in part because of pushback from advocates calling for residents to be employed on stimulus-related housing work and increased follow-up from HUD, even NYCHA critics agree the agency has made a real effort to step up job training and hiring of tenants. In 2009 tenant groups tried to fill the gap by offering the OSHA training, but couldn't keep up with demand. Now, the trainings still fill up fast, but at least NYCHA is the one offering them.

"I think more people are starting to hear about Section 3," says Roxanne Reid, the Castle Hill tenant association president and a member of the advocacy group Community Voices Heard, who worked for eight hours a week through a Section 3 contract from July through December, when the project expired. "They are getting people hired. Some of them are even getting into the union. I don't like to see young kids on the street, wasting their time. I just wish [NYCHA] would get more [people] on board and hire more, so they have something to look forward to."