August 21, 2007
A Close Look at Public Housing
"Hard Times in the Projects," an in-depth review of New York City's publicly subsidized housing program, reveals how living conditions have declined over the past few decades. Federal legislators have reduced funds while operating costs have soared. As a consequence, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) struggles to maintain its buildings, collect the trash, or respond to service calls. Residents have experienced rent hikes and service cuts, and face the possible closure of senior centers and community programs. While New York State and City governments also cut funding during the 1990s and 2000s, the administrations of Bloomberg and Spitzer have recently anounced the restoration of some subsidies.
"Simply put, public housing makes living in New York possible for thousands of low-income families," says the article in Gotham Gazette. Will this be true much longer?
Highlights from the article:
- 400,000 New Yorkers live in NYCHA homes
- Average annual family income in public housing: $20,000
- Average rent: $320
- The waiting list: 130,000 people.
- NYCHA employees: 13,000
- Current NYCHA budget: $2.7 billion, of which $700 million goes for capital expenses
- The City eliminated its $25M contribution after 9/11, but appropriated $120M in 2006.
- The conviction of one family member in public housing can put a whole family on probation
- Tensions with police have escalated since the 1995 merger of housing police with the NYPD
- New York was the first American city to build public housing in 1934 (First Houses on the Lower East Side).
More:
William Thompson says NYCHA leaves apartments vacant too long
Daily News: A Crisis Hits Home
NYCHA website
WNYC: Albany to Aid New York City Housing Authority
Photo collage courtesy Gotham Gazette; image from "What's Up With Public Housing?" project by CUP.
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education, education, education! why aren't parents stressing education? it's free!
tear em all down
end RC & RS
watch the affordable housing crisis vanish
at the very least there should be no PH in manhattan...no one has a RIGHT to live on thsi island with an absurd subsidy
Public House is a bunch of crap. like #2 said, tear 'em all down.
I heart the projects.
These apartments wouldn't exist if our government actually cared about minorities getting a proper education so that they can get decent paying jobs when they grow up. But, they don't care at all. So, they let them rent really cheap apartments.
Until our government puts money into the ghettos, nothing will change. The richer will get richer. The poor will stay poor. And the middle class will continue to get screwed.
*sigh*... I cannot make up my mind about whether public housing/rent control/rent stabilization are good or not. I think there are strong arguments on both sides. Can anyone persuade me one way or the other?
condos next to the projects are market priced. great deal for the project dweller and sucky for the condo owner.
Tearing down these apartments would be idiotic, unless you don't mind a lot of crime.
Properly educating people requires effort on multiple fronts and it all starts at home. You can pay the teachers more but it won't keep kids in school or make them pay attention. Is there any reason to believe a kid is going to be less disruptive is the student teacher ratio drops from say 25 to 18? But we're not allowed to say such things.
no one has a right to be here
practically free rent
plus in some cases parking spaces!!
give me a f*cking break
tear them down
housing projects are an oudated concept championed by lazy thinkers
especially the superblock, tower in the park crap
I wonder if the people who want these things torn down are also the same people who don't want minimum wage to be raised.
I heart the projects too. The hood rats make there me feel good 'bout myself.
400k? That's a lot of freeloaders considering there are 8m denizens in the city.
Public housing should be a temporary measure not a multi-generational reliance on subsidies.
Poor people that have multiple children are doing their kids a disservice. My wife and I both work very hard and we cannot aford more than two. How much more tax should we pay to subsidize those that lack restraint?
#11...you are a lazy thinker
i agree, public housing and rent control/stabilization should come to an end. at the very least, it should only be a safty net, like unemployment that you can only use for a limited time to get on your feet. the city is already so damn expensive, I can barely afford to live here let alone subsidize others with my taxes (NYC is the highest taxed in the country)and rent. even when you buy a new place, they are trying to force builders to build 80/20 subsidized units, increasing the prices some more. enough already.
if they tear down the projects, I personally would provide them with guns to protect themselves and for survival. I need not worry though, they'll get them one way or another, with or without my help. so you guys get yours.
let's have it out. ummkay?
One of the problems with public housing in the U.S. is that it is a remnant of our half-assed attempt at creating a social state between 1930's and 1970's a la Western Europe and Canada.
The US was always way too right leaning to ever accept well funded, publicly subsidized housing, health care, education (remember, most European countries pay for their citizens' education THROUGH college and even grad school). Even when the projects were built, they were built shoddy and they were not maintained. And as soon as the projects turned mostly black and latino, (they were largely white when built in NY) much of the support for public housing declined. And of course lets not forget powerful lobbying from the real estate and homebuilding industries, which fought (and fight) any idea of public housing every step of the way, tooth and nail.
Plus, the design of projects, from an architectural/urban planning standpoint was pretty bad. Entire neighborhoods (which in the 1940's and 50's were poor, but not necessarily crime-ridden) and their fragile social fabric were destroyed. Tower in the park modernism simply concentrated poverty and killed street-life that can (but doesn't always) keep crime in check.
In short, when you underfund bad architectural design and misguided planning ideas then leave it to rot, you get a problem...that's what happened to public housing in the US.
That being said, New York's public housing program is probably the best in the country (as sad as that is). At least the projects are full and there is waiting list. Many of the most notorious projects in country, including the long destroyed Pruitt-Igoe in St Louis and Cabrini-Green in Chicago were so bad b/c they were half vacant and the vacants turned into crackhouses/prostitution dens, etc.
(sorry for the essay, I just think a lot of people have no idea about the history of public housing and rush to uniformed and knee-jerk judgments.)
wow, so many republicans read gothamist! who knew?
#15
I want these damn things torn down too, but unless the government has some kind of plan in place, what's going to happen to all the people living there? It's not as simple as just telling them to leave the city. It will cause more problems.
Our stupid government created this mess by essentially telling people that it's ok be uneducated and in some cases lazy, because as long as they don't make too much money, they'll be there to help them out.
So, our stupid government needs to correct this, before they turn their back on these people. Clean up the ghettos. Increase minimum wage. Educate.
Isn't public housing a form of restitution for slavery? All you taxpayers should feel good about yourselves!
#18, have you ever seen public housing in Europe? Most of it is as bad as ours.
#19, this may come as a shock to you but not everyone subscribes 100% to the platform of either party. There is a huge center out there. Did you know almost half of people that identify themselves as Democrats oppose gay marriage?
You don't have to be a republican to recognize that public housing has been an unmitigated disaster for urban landscapes and inhabitants everywhere. Hey, I think it was Bill Clinton who ended welfare as we knew it. And there are very few Democrats out there who would return to that system. There's got to be an analog for public housing.
19 - how did you glean this from the comments? I am a Democrat and I do not support public housing or rent subsidies in the least. I agree with the other comment above, these things should only be a temporary measure, not something that becomes intergenerational and creates more failure.
Poll: White youths happier than others
NEW YORK - From their relationships to their jobs to their money — even from they time they first roll out of bed — young white Americans are happier with life than their minority counterparts.
Among whites, 20 percent feel their race will help in getting ahead.
14, 16 and 18 & 20 make some good points
19, ur an idiot
Why do almost all projects provide parking lots? Especially in a city so concerned about congestion, asthma rates for the poor neighborhoods, and stressing pubic transportation, it subsidizes parking for its low income tenants and their Escalades.
Why?
I suppose everybody missed the part where the avg family income is $20K?
#22, yes I have seen a lot of public housing in Europe. Mostly in France (Paris, Marseilles, smaller cities in Brittany and Normandy, Toulouse), but also a lot in Spain, the Netherlands and Norway. There are some very bad ones, no doubt. The Paris suburbs are probably some of the worst and most infamous. But I'd blame conditions in the banlieues less on public housing and on problems created by high unemployment and bad immigration policy which keeps an entire class of citizens in limbo between citizenship and outsider. Just my opinion.
But not all European public housing is like what you see in Le Haine. And on the whole, European public housing is much better than that of the US. Nothing is perfect, and I never argued that...but some things are better than other things. Also, looking into public housing in Hong Kong for an example of massive public housing sector in an otherwise quite free market city...
>New York was the first American city to build public housing in 1934 (First Houses on the Lower East Side).
New York City ceases to amaze me! What didn't originate in NYC? I'm not trying to be clever - I'm serious.
Ibrahim
www.BehindtheApprovalMatrix.com
Gideon Fink Shapiro? ROFLMAO
Avg income $20K/yr. Escalades start at $55K - what up?
HA HA, rtd schooled you number 22!
don't worry rtd2101, #22 just re-hashes what he sees on Fox news or some other conservative pundit on CNN or whatever.
Wow! rtd2101 really knows his/her shit. Such well-informed and well though out responses are almost unheard of.
right #30, because nyc is so hong kongy. from what i've seen, euro projects have no greater success than american versions.
Hey, with Google and Wikepdia - and a little copy and paste- everyone's a genius..!
rtd2101 Wins!
all you one sentence responders lose, that's you #37
no, i think #38 wins.
PH residents should be provided free metrocard, and forbidden to purchase a car.
providing parking for them is insane
There, there - we probably have a student of urban theory amongst us - NOT exactly rocket science LOL
rtd2101 won nothing. Norway has slightly more than half the population of New York City and relies on oil exports to fund their social services.
And rtd2101 admits the French projects are bad but tries to explain it away to social conditions that cut off the population. We have the same problem here only our segment of the population in public housing happens to be poor citizens rather than poor immigrants. That's pretty much irrelevent to the people actually living in the projects. Both systems are obviously deficient. If the Europeans were as clever as rtd2101 wants us to believe they would have a system to overcome this.
we have a bunch of Jealous haters here.
a hard rains a comin.
#44 - more lazy thinking
yawn
#45, you're an idiot.
Have you actually responded with anything intelligent at all, or do you just like calling people lazy thinkers?
1934... wish we could turn back the hands of time... I am all for giving someone a helping hand, but this multi generational thing should be againist the law. I feel lucky to say that my family and myself have never needed that kind of help.... And I agree with putting a time frame on it.
It should be suggested to the new Congestion Pricing Commission that these parking lots should be sold off and the revenues used to create public transportation from these areas.
The "towers in the park" is an architectural style of Corbusier not restricted to public housing. You can see it in middle class and even luxury housing of the same period (e.g., in the Upper East Side). It's often hard to tell them apart from a distance. Inside, of course, there are big differences. Nevertheless, the model of leaving open space is not a bad one for the environment. We need ways to improve them, however. I suggest turning the ground floor to commercial space, and swapping units with those in market-rate buildings, so each can contain a mix of incomes. This will have to be accompanied with new amenities, of course.
calling those who see the obvious flaws of public housing "republicans" or "jealous", or implying thet we hate the poor or that there is no ther way...is lazy & simple minded
sorry if ur offended
Anyone have the racial breakdown for the NYC housing projects - just curious, seriously!
54% black
37% latino
8% asian
1% white
Jersey City Housing Authority seems to run their buildings better than the NY projects. The police know the residents and the residents know the police, unlike in New York where they send a lot of the inexperienced cops into the projects and other "bad" areas.
It's all too easy to forget that NYC's early public housing was a response to a very real need to house both working families and those families left without means by the fact of structural unemployment (or racial discrimination). Left to their own devices in a hot 1920s market most developers failed to initiate housing for these families. Similar to today, that decade saw a wave of luxury developments in working-class neighborhoods. Moreover, landlords of existing tenements failed to bring them up to even the basic standards set by the city, fueling the shortage of decent housing and casting doubt on trickle-down housing theories. This is the history that folks who argue for a complete real estate free-for-all in the name of abstract market laws miss. Rather than solving the problem, market dynamics exacerbated it. Public housing in the form it took from the 1930s to the 1960s may not have been the best solution to the problem, but its genesis reveals the problems with dogmatic belief in the private sector. Sure, we can still argue that no family has a right to stable or even decent housing, but where's the humanity in that?
is that 8% of asians living in the Confusious tower thing?
Eliminate public housing. It has been a complete failure. Wherever public housing was built, it killed the neighborhood. And there is a correlation between the rise in public housing and the ensuing businesses fleeing NYC and the city going into bankruptcy. I know from talking to people that worked in public housing during the 1960s and on , the majority of the people moving in were not New Yorkers. They came from the South. The $2.5 billion can be appropriated to our schools, and to assist the middle class in many ways in this city.
[53], you raise some good points, but I think there's a difference between saying "no family has a right to stable housing" and saying "no family has a right to stable housing located in Manhattan".
There are market-rate apartments for $320/month (the average rent quoted above) elsewhere in New York State. You don't have an inalienable right to have low-cost housing AND live in the most congested real estate market in the country.
This is not the 1920's. The rest of the country is now developed. There are plenty of affordable places to move. There is no reason to subsidize anyone to live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country. Everyone should work, have family sizes they can pay for and move where they find it affordable. No one should feel *entitled* to the kindness of others. There should be temporary safety nets, but I emphasize temporary.