From the Daily News:
Thirteen years ago the New York City Housing Authority got a big pile of taxpayer money to fix up the deteriorating Prospect Plaza houses in Ocean Hill, Brooklyn.
It never happened.
NYCHA moved all 1,500 residents into apartments scattered around the city in 2000 with the promise that they’d all be back in new and improved versions of their familiar locales by 2005.
They hired a developer and planned to spend the $148 million, including money they’d borrow plus a $21 million grant allocated to them by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Today Prospect Plaza is a ghost town, a boarded-up testament to bureaucratic bungling and constantly shifting priorities that illustrates the agency’s inabilty to get the job done, even when it’s handed free money.
Of the $21 million HUD awarded NYCHA in 1999, a stunning $17 million remains unspent, and a project that NYCHA vowed would transform lives has instead become a symbol of incompetence.
4 comments:
What happened to the money???? Oh, pennies to politians. Too small an amount to even keep track of...
All projects should be torn down.
See here, the future of Queensbridge and Astoria houses.
from Village Voice,8/5/2008,wayne barrett
"Andrew Cuomo, the youngest H.U.D. secretary in history, made a series of decisions between 1997 and 2001 that gave birth to the countries crisis. actions that helped plunge Fannie and Freddie into the subprime markets without putting in place the means to monitor their increasingly risky investments.
kudos to George The A. and Q.C
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