NYCHA’s Great Leap Forward
By Kemba Johnson

There could be lots to love in the New York City Housing Authority’s new five-year plan, but leafing through undefined programs described with ambiguous terminology, you might not know it. And one program that is spelled out in the document, an income-mixing plan, has quickly drawn the ire of public-housing residents and advocates.

Under orders from the 1998 federal public-housing law, the Housing Authority drew up “one-year” and “five-year” plans, and in August released the documents in a foot-thick pile of papers. So far, one of the most controversial elements is NYCHA’s income-mixing plan, where working families are lured into high-poverty buildings with the offer of an extra bedroom.

The program is in response to the 1998 law, which calls for better distribution of higher- and low-income families in public housing developments. But while the Housing Authority’s plan puts higher-income families into the lowest-income buildings, it doesn’t offer any plan to put the poorest tenants into the better buildings. NYCHA justifies the decision by pointing out that even its higher-income developments have a high poverty rate. Advocates counter that the plan is unfair to extremely poor families who have languished on the public-housing waiting list for years. The report also floats ideas like leasing privately owned units, developing a “comprehensive citywide self-sufficiency program,” starting “joint ventures and partnerships” with the private sector and NYCHA residents, and “leveraging private financial resources” for poor residents—without much further description. “There are a lot of open questions,” says Vic Bach, director of housing policy research at the Community Service Society. “[The document] has a plain vanilla wrapper, but has some important issues that need to be addressed.”

Other NYCHA shifts include:

• changing the domestic-violence preference to include families where the batterer is not a relative;

• giving disabled people in non-elevator buildings priority for transfers;

• and increasing closed-circuit television surveillance.

The agency is currently accepting public comments on the document (see NYCHA’s Website at www.ci.nyc.ny.us/html/nycha/html/phaps.html) and has a public hearing scheduled for September 29.

Reprinted with permission from City Limits Weekly.