OPINION: Fix NYCHA now
There’s a troubling status quo for many of the 400,000 New Yorkers who reside in New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) apartments: water dripping through ceilings, stoves that catch on fire, mold that goes untouched for years. It’s an unacceptable reality that has lingered for far too long.
Since I took office last year, my office has conducted six audits of NYCHA. We’ve looked at how the Housing Authority handles its supplies, procures funding, and manages vacant apartments. While the focus of the audits has ranged widely, the outcome has been uniform: NYCHA’s results repeatedly fail to meet basic standards.
Our first NYCHA audit found that public housing and low-income New Yorkers lost out on hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential wages because the Authority failed to comply with federal law, and botched the implementation of the program it had developed to employ residents at NYCHA sites. Later, a financial audit found that NYCHA didn’t apply for available federal funding, and as a result left nearly $700 million in revenue and savings on the table, squandering an important chance to bring boilers, lighting and hot water heaters to residents. Our audit of NYCHA’s management of vacant apartments found that despite the fact that there are 270,000 New Yorkers waiting for NYCHA housing, the Authority left eighty apartments sitting vacant for more than ten years!
Most recently, my office looked at how well NYCHA repaired and maintained its apartments. What we found could make your head spin: 55,000 backlogged repair requests —– nearly 900 at the Breukelen Houses in Canarsie alone. It takes NYCHA an average of 370 days to fix building safety violations and, most incredibly, it has a policy that closes repair work orders if residents aren’t home when repairmen come to visit.