




New York City Housing Authority

For one thing, NYCHA is a much bigger entity than any other public-housing authority in the country, which allowed it to escape some of the regulatory mandates in other cities, said Susan Popkin, a fellow with the Urban Institute who has written extensively on public housing. For another, just about everybody in New York lives in dense housing. So it’s hard to argue that poor people are being discriminated against by being relegated to high-rises. And some housing projects are located in some of the wealthiest areas in Manhattan, which gives public housing residents a chance to access some of the same services as wealthier New Yorkers, such as schools (assuming that wealthier New Yorkers send their kids to public schools).

“NYCHA just didn’t have the same level of isolation as other cities—they didn’t have a Cabrini Green,” Popkin told me.

New York did receive three HOPE VI grants and built high-density, mixed-income units with them. But compared to other cities, this money was a pittance, nowhere near enough to transform the city’s public housing. The $88 million New York received for the projects, was just a fraction of NYCHA’s budget. The Boston Housing Authority, by contrast, has received $157 million for HOPE VI projects. To put those numbers in context, today NYCHA’s budget is around $2.6 billion, the Boston Housing Authority’s budget is $300 million.

What’s more, real estate in New York City is so ridiculously expensive that there would be no way to affordably create enough public housing if the city were to tear down the high-rises.

But now New York City is in a bind. It didn’t have to tear down its high-rises under HOPE VI. But it also didn’t receive federal funding to improve its public housing, as HOPE VI recipients did (in the first decade of the program, the government dispersed $5 billion through HOPE VI). Now, NYCHA is left trying to figure out how to maintain decades-old buildings and reduce the number of people on the waiting list for public housing, all as federal funding for public housing continues to drop.

Popkin, with the Urban Institute, worries that this means that certain high rises in New York’s public-housing system are becoming as bad as the worst projects initially targeted in HOPE VI. Brownsville, in Brooklyn, is now the largest concentration of public housing in the country, for example. Brownsville also has the lowest median household income in New York City. In many other areas of the country, an area of one square mile of public housing would not be allowed to exist anymore. In New York, it still does, even as violence worsens and gangs take over. And the city doesn’t have the funds to change that, let alone improve other public housing buildings.

“Right now, they’re just in an impossible financial situation. Unless there is some serious investment, I worry that it’s just going to continue to get worse,” Popkin told me. “I worry about places like Brownsville.”