OPINION: When ‘the projects’ were a great place to live
For the past week, the New York City Housing Authority has been under constant attack for, among other things, leaving $1 billion in federal money unspent while tenants in the city’s housing projects often have to wait a year to get simple repairs.
The scandal comes on top of the public’s basic perception that housing projects are basically drug-ridden, crime-ridden, gang-ridden developments where most of the tenants are single mothers on welfare. While this is a gross exaggeration, as a one-time assistant manager of the giant Edenwald Houses in the northeast Bronx, I can testify that there’s a grain of truth to this stereotype.
But earlier, between the ages of five and 19, mainly during the 1960s and early 1970s, I grew up in a city housing project — Marble Hill Houses in the northwest Bronx. And at that time, the projects were seen as desirable places to live.