Chapter 4: High Hopes, Steep Challenges for NYCHA

Public housing in New York might not disappear in a fire sale. It might go unit by unit as NYCHA is starved of subsidies. "This is death by strangulation," says NYCHA board member Margarita Lopez. "Do you know how you die by strangulation? Very slowly."

Hopes for avoiding that fate rose when Barack Obama won the presidency. Obama's position papers and the Democratic platform call for a restoration of the public housing operating subsidy. As Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority boss Joseph Shuldiner points out, the obstacle to public housing isn't the cost, but ideology. What public housing needs, "is really a pittance," he says. "This is less than a B-1 bomber. In the federal government, this is a rounding error. It's a question of priorities."

But the priorities in the New York City area are vastly different from those in the places most members of Congress represent. On a practical level, the demolition of public housing around the country has eroded the constituency that might press elected officials to fight to preserve it. New York now has 15 percent of all the public housing in the country. "New York City is becoming more and more different from every city in the country," Apple says. "That makes it really more challenging in Washington because every other city in this country has actually demolished public housing, eliminated public housing and changed public housing. I actually just spent some time with the head of the Atlanta housing agency, and she was proud to announce that the last public housing in Atlanta had been demolished."

Belief that public housing has been a failure is conventional wisdom even among liberals. That's one reason the Manhattan Institute's Julia Vitullo-Martin scoffs at the idea that the Democrats will ride to the rescue. "Remember when Clinton came into office? He had a Democratic House and Senate, and what did they do?" she asks. "They immediately dismantled whole sections of public housing."

If the feds fail to step up, Albany can't be depended on for help. The state has been steadily converting public housing outside of New York City to mixed-income projects that do not serve the poorest of the poor. Vito Lopez, the legislator from Brooklyn who heads the Assembly's Housing Committee, doesn't seem interested in asking Governor David Paterson for more. "Could the state give a little more? Maybe," he says. "But it's never going to address the pressing issue." In fact, the $3.4 million subsidy that NYCHA won from the state last year is on Paterson's list of possible cuts to close to state's budget gap.

The Bloomberg administration is equally unlikely to pick up the slack. With the city cutting a class of police cadets, decreasing the staffing of firehouses and hiking taxes, public housing can't expect to get more help. "NYCHA is always an agency that needs more money," Bloomberg said as he announced 200 layoffs at NYCHA community centers in November. "We've invested an enormous amount in safety and facilities and cleanliness, and we're not going to walk away from public housing."

It is unclear what role Shaun Donovan, the former HPD commissioner who is Obama's pick to head HUD, might play in rescuing public housing from his new federal post. Meanwhile, the city's own housing policy is at a crossroads as a new commissioner takes over HPD and the search goes on for a permanent new NYCHA chairman (Ricardo Elías Morales took over temporarily when Tino Hernandez resigned in December).

Even if the White House and Congress did go to bat for public housing, housing historian Nicholas Dagen Bloom warns, "The problem is that long-term costs will continue to increase, and there will still be, from Washington, pressure to move public housing further away from a large government program" to something smaller-scale, involving private money and probably serving fewer people at the low-end of the income range.