The shoe is on the other foot

From Crains:

Mayor Bill de Blasio is preparing a revised plan to raise money for the troubled New York City Housing Authority by working with private property managers and developers. And a major change to the blueprint involves trimming the amount of affordable housing that will be created—something that would have been anathema to the mayor just three years ago.

The city's plan, which officials said will be released by the end of the year, will be called Nycha 2.0 and will consist of increasing the number of developments managed by private companies, selling air rights and building new apartment towers on vacant or underused land, according to Politico New York, which first reported the initiative. Officials believe they can raise nearly $22 billion, which would take out a significant chunk of the authority's current $32 billion capital needs.

One key element of the plan is developing new apartments on Nycha-owned land that would generate income for the agency, something that was first proposed under the Bloomberg administration. Under that initiative, the buildings would have been 80% market-rate and 20% affordable.

"The idea was to generate money to repair the existing buildings and create significant new affordable housing, though the buildings would not have been 100% affordable," said Fred Harris, a former Nycha executive who helped draft the plan.

However, de Blasio criticized the Bloomberg plan as "a pure giveaway to wealthy elites" and in his NextGen plan proposed buildings that would be entirely affordable or split evenly between affordable and market rate.

Judge says "no deal" on public housing plan

From the NY Times:

A federal judge rejected a sweeping settlement on Wednesday that would have appointed a monitor to oversee the troubled New York City Housing Authority and required the city to pump at least $1.2 billion into repairs.

The judge, William H. Pauley III, also strongly suggested that the federal government should take over the authority instead.

In a scathing opinion, Judge Pauley deplored the “breathtaking scope” of the squalid living conditions in the city’s public housing complexes. He rebuked the city for its mismanagement of the agency, and said the federal government had abdicated its legal responsibility to overhaul the nation’s largest stock of public housing that is home to about 400,000 vulnerable New Yorkers.

The unexpected ruling threw the future of the Housing Authority into doubt and unraveled a deal that Mayor Bill de Blasio had staked his reputation on as a champion of public housing tenants.

Bland Houses host fighting vermin

From PIX11:

Melba Nazario lives at the Bland Houses in Flushing says she saw rats fighting raccoons for trash.

Nazario said when she tries to complain to the management office, it’s always closed.

A spokesperson for NYCHA said exterminators are treating the area every two weeks for any rodent issues, with the last treatment on Oct. 29. They are scheduling to address any raccoons at the development. The animals will be safely relocated. Also, all the garbage and trash around Senior Center have already been removed by staff, a spokesperson promised.

The Bland Houses’ office has been closed briefly due to a staffing shortage, a spokespersons aid. It will be reopening Dec. 4.

City will build senior apartments amidst housing projects

From the Wall Street Journal:

New York City has committed $500 million to build up to a thousand of affordable apartments for low-income senior citizens on vacant public-housing land, a move advocates say would help reduce the wait list for apartments.

The plan, first pushed in the proposed new budget by New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, will construct new apartment buildings on lawns, parking lots and unused land at New York City Housing Authority developments and other public locations. The units will be set aside for low-income senior citizens, many of whom already live in public housing.

“If you can get seniors living now in two-, three-bedroom apartments in NYCHA to move into new apartments, you make room for folks who are on the waiting list,” said the Rev. David Brawley, pastor at St. Paul Community Baptist Church in Brooklyn’s East New York section and member of the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation.

There are 207,000 families on the wait list for public housing, and addressing that number could help reduce homelessness, Mr. Brawley said. There are currently more than 58,700 people living in shelters across the city, according to the latest data.

Developer wants to build on kids' playground

From NBC:

Plans to build a 47-story high-rise on top of a playground on the Upper East Side has residents upset: a developer wants to place it smack in the middle of the Holmes Towers public housing complex. Erica Byfield reports.

Being mobilized helps

From DNA Info:

The low-income communities of the Lower East Side and the Rockaways both suffered extensive damage from Superstorm Sandy four years ago.

But advocates on the Lower East Side were able to engage more effectively in post-storm resiliency efforts than their counterparts in Queens because they already had a robust network of community activism in place from years of fighting gentrification, according to a recently published study from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice & the Graduate Center.

Researchers focused on the role of community organizations and being able to respond to the “climate change politics” of the city, which is increasingly important as the frequency of storms is expected to rise along with rising sea levels, noted Leigh Graham, John Jay environmental psychology professor and lead author of the study.

While both areas have high concentrations of public housing residents and low-income households, the Lower East Side’s pre-existing civic infrastructure of community based organizations and social services fighting against development pressures enabled residents to recover more quickly, according to researchers who spent six months interviewing community groups in the area and 18 months in the Rockaways.

The Rockaways, on the other hand, were at a disadvantage, not only because the area is more geographically isolated on the far edge of the city, but also because it’s more racially and economically segregated.

There’s a high concentration of poverty along the eastern part of the peninsula where the residents have suffered from decades of economic “malaise,” which in effect weakened and undermined their post-storm response, researchers found.

“The Lower East Side and the Rockaways had similar levels of exposure in terms of storm flooding,” Graham said, “but the Lower East Side groups were basically a partner in a lot of the resiliency efforts after the storm, in part because residents, who live there, have been fighting gentrification for 30 to 40 years and established a level of organization, trust and power, that they were able to get a seat at the table as important stakeholders.”

Community groups on the Rockaways did not have the same level of organization prior to the storm and remain more focused on meeting present economic needs than on pursing long-term resilience planning, she noted.

Gangs responsible for 40% of murders in NYC

From the Daily News:

Along with the mass killers and rifle-toting terrorists who are driving the nation’s gun debate are New York’s own gangbangers, who are behind the triggers of nearly half the city’s shootings, officials said.

And when gunplay across the five boroughs turns deadly, gang members are quite often responsible, accounting for 130, or 40%, of the city’s murders this year, police said.

It’s not just the traditional beefs over drugs or money, cops said. Crews are calling each other out over the smallest of slights or — worse yet — the belief that shooting someone will turn a boy into a man.

“It’s a fearsome reality: violence for its own sake,” Police Commissioner Bill Bratton told the Daily News. “The gun has come to define manhood for these young men, and the willingness to use it has become a rite of passage.”

Killings by gangs or crews — smaller groups of young men who claim one or two blocks as their turf — are expected to be slightly higher this year than in 2014, although cops were still tallying the numbers, police sources said.

As of Dec. 6, the 324 murders in the city represented a 5.5% increase over the 307 homicides committed by the same date last year. The number of shootings as of Dec. 6 was 1,061, a 3.2% decrease from the 1,296 committed in the same time frame in 2014. Overall serious crime is down 2.4% citywide.

The News obtained data from the NYPD’s Gang and Juvenile Justice divisions and used it to create maps showing where gangs and crews operate in the city. There are about 375 citywide, mostly clustered around housing projects.

Map is here.

Housing project residents ripping off the system

From the Daily News:

A slew of public housing tenants ripped off the taxpayers by under-reporting income to inflate their benefits, the city Department of Investigation charged Friday.

Over the last few weeks, 17 tenants have been charged with stealing public funds, including 12 who deliberately hid income-producing husbands and other relatives to collect more federal rent subsidies.

Two tenants even managed to pull this off despite the fact that their husbands worked for the city, according to DOI Commissioner Mark Peters.

One tenant got the federal subsidy, known as Section 8, without reporting that her husband was the super in the privately owned Section 8 building where they lived.

People with high incomes living in public housing

From PIX11:

PIX11 Investigates has found over 1,500 households earning six-figure salaries while living in New York City Housing Authority apartments.

NYCHA's NYPD unit will stay after all

From the Daily News:

The NYPD has backed off from its plan to push four huge Queens public housing developments out of a police unit devoted to protecting public housing.

Tenants and Councilman Jimmy Van Bramer (D-Queens) raised hell about the proposal, demanding answers as to why NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton would make a move they say would have contradicted his “community policing” mantra.

On Wednesday, the department switched course, deciding instead to create a unit that will exclusively cover the developments — including Queensbridge Houses, the biggest housing project in America.

“We won,” said Queensbridge Tenant Association President April Simpson-Taylor. “They’re going to compromise. I’m really excited about this.”

NYPD taking police away from NYCHA projects

From the Daily News:

Tenants at four housing developments in northern Queens — including the Queensbridge Houses, the nation’s largest — are furious about plans to eliminate an NYPD command assigned specifically to those projects.

They say the 158 officers from Public Service Area 9 have established strong community ties and worked to dramatically cut crime in the developments that house 17,800 people. The housing cops will be reassigned to the local precinct, according to documents obtained by the Daily News.

Residents were baffled, arguing that the switch runs counter to Police Commissioner Bill Bratton’s focus on “community policing.”

“Why reinvent the wheel?” asked Queensbridge Tenant Association President April Simpson-Taylor. “Mayor de Blasio and Commissioner Bratton are always talking about building relationships with the police. We have a great relationship with the police. And now that we have it, they want to take it away?”

NYCHA getting market rate housing

From the Daily News:

The de Blasio administration plans to put up hundreds of market-rate apartments on public land at NYCHA developments in two hot real estate neighborhoods, officials said Wednesday.

The plan targets two developments — Wyckoff Gardens in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, and Holmes Towers on the Upper East Side — both in neighborhoods where land is considered “high value.” NYCHA would either sell to or enter into 99-year leases with developers to build more than 1,000 units, half to be affordable and half to rent at market rates.

The plan would allow the cash-strapped housing authority to build more affordable housing and also generate revenue, officials said.

De Blasio’s mixed-use project is a slightly revamped version of a failed plan by his predecessor, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who suggested the developments be 80% market rate apartments.

The Bloomberg plan — which specifically targeted eight Manhattan developments — was attacked by tenants who felt they hadn’t been consulted. Many were also concerned it would further exacerbate gentrification in their rapidly changing neighborhoods.

$10M to bring broadband service to projects

From CBS:

Free broadband Internet service is coming to public housing in New York City.

The city will invest $10 million at five New York City Housing Authority developments in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx to provide high-speed broadband service.

Mayor Bill de Blasio and other officials announced the initiative Thursday at the Mott Haven Houses in the Bronx, 1010 WINS’ Mona Rivera reported.

U.S. Housing Secretary Julian Castro said the federal government will help the city with the initiative. Also, private companies are donating technology, including Sprint, which will make mobile Wi-Fi devices available to NYCHA households in the Bronx with school-aged children.

So the projects are literally falling apart, but at least the residents can sign into Facebook. Great priorities here.

Tons of NYCHA apartments sit empty

From the Daily News:

NYCHA is “sitting on” more than 2,000 vacant apartments even as hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in need of housing languish for years on waiting lists, City Controller Scott Stringer said in a new audit released Wednesday.

The audit found NYCHA had 2,342 empty apartments as of late last year — and 312 of those, which were removed from the rolls for major repairs, had been vacant an average of seven years.

“It’s shameful, totally unacceptable that they’re been empty for so long,” Stringer said. “People are desperate for homes. You cannot keep vacant apartments off the market for years and years with no explanation.”

He said 80 apartments were vacant for over a decade, another 79 were empty at least seven years — and one apartment in the Harlem River Houses had been left vacant since 1994.

The cash-strapped agency lost out on almost $8 million in rent from apartments vacant for at least three years, according to the audit. “The bill for this incompetence is huge,” he said.

NYCHA had a waiting list of 273,391 people as of December, the reports says.

The agency says it had 2,196 vacant apartments last month, a 39% decrease from the beginning of 2013.

Bogus parking permits at housing projects

From NBC:

As the de Blasio administration seeks to raise parking rates in the lots next to public housing towers, an I-Team investigation finds vehicle owners are frequently parking for free, using borrowed permits, expired permits or no permits at all.

Over the course of three weeks, the I-Team paid multiple visits to five New York Public Housing Authority lots that were previously cited for fraudulent parking practices in a 2012 City Department of Investigation probe.

The I-Team found free riders were at it again, parking without valid permits and getting away with it.

"Summer All Out" campaign will target high crime areas

From the Daily News:

Hundreds of cops will flood city streets beginning Monday as part of an aggressive NYPD initiative called “Summer All Out” to stanch the rise in murders and shootings.

More than 330 new police officers will take to some of the city’s grittiest blocks and precincts in an effort to bring this year’s homicide statistics back in line with last year’s historic lows.

The officers taking part in the crimefighting program will be assigned to work peak crime shifts — 4 p.m. to midnight and midnight to 8 a.m. — in areas like the 75th Precinct in East New York, Brooklyn (11 homicides through May 31), the 67th Precinct in East Flatbush, Brooklyn (seven homicides), and the 113th Precinct in St. Albans and Hollis, Queens (seven homicides).

They will also concentrate on public housing developments with the highest crimes rates.

Tear Queensbridge down in order to save it?

From LICTalk:

Since Mayor de Blasio fantasizes to the press about covering Sunnyside Yards and building affordable housing on top of it, I have decided to put forth a more pragmatic housing solution that focuses on the original intent of government. Raze Queensbridge and put up brand new towers for both the poor and whomever qualifies for ‘affordable housing’ in NYC in 2015.

Well the Queensbridge Houses, the largest public housing development in North America, are a relic in all respects. The housing is antiquated and dilapidated. It’s completely isolated with a bridge on the south, a river to the west, and warehouses and autobody shops to it’s east and north. Any occasional talk/press about it’s being a vibrant community, is completely negated by the fact that it’s too dangerous to be outside of at night.

But guess what else Queensbridge is? Low density and extremely close to the city. All the buildings are only six stories high, there’s a namesake station on its eastern border that’s two stops from Manhattan, and the Queensboro Plaza station four blocks from there has multiple lines just one stop into Midtown.

So here’s the plan.

1. Knock down the existing 3,000+ units

2. Rezone to allow 30-story buildings = 15,000 units

3. Sell the property to a developer with two stipulations 1) 4,500 units are controlled by NYCHA (the NYC public housing agency). 2) the other 10,500 apartments are market rate but rent-stabilized, just like Linc LIC and Gantry Park Landing are.

Vibrant and diverse fishing habits

From the NY Times:

It may seem like an unusual spot to catch dinner, across the East River from Manhattan’s imposing skyline. And the tiny fish that a group of fisherwomen trap in these waters may not seem like dinner at all.

But the women, Bangladeshi immigrants who live nearby, show up nearly every day, along a stretch of Vernon Boulevard in Queens that overlooks a sheltered section of the East River known as Hallet’s Cove.

They wear long, colorful dresses and head scarves, and tote numerous metal traps that they toss into the river to lure small, silvery fish typically used by many anglers as bait and commonly called spearing or shiners.

Small fish like these happen to be staples of the Bangladeshi diet, often stir-fried with rice and vegetables. So these women appear this time of year when schools of the fish are plentiful in New York City’s warm waterways, even in this urban stretch of river where the coastline is dominated by power plants and sewage treatment centers.

The women, who lack a New York State-mandated recreational fishing license or a city permit to fish near a boat launch at the location, also seem to be far exceeding the strict limitations that state health authorities recommend for eating fish taken from the East River.

The woman said that when enough fish were in her bucket, she would, as usual, take them home to her family’s apartment in the nearby Astoria Houses public housing project, and serve them to her family for dinner, frying them and adding tomato sauce, garlic, onions, chili pepper and other spices.

Affordable housing is falling apart

From Capital New York:

As Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration embarks on an ambitious plan to expand the stock of affordable housing for New Yorkers, he faces another daunting task: Ensuring those homes are safe, comfortable places to live.

A report released Monday morning by Comptroller Scott Stringer finds that the city’s affordable housing stock—both rent-regulated and public—is in a state of disrepair.

New York has come a long way in the 125 years since Jacob Riis wrote How the Other Half Lives, the report notes. But in some areas, the gains of the last century are slipping away.

The 27-page report finds a wide gap between the conditions of market-rate housing and the rest of the city’s apartment stock, noting disparities along income and racial lines. There are noteworthy differences in the conditions of stabilized housing and market-rate.

In 2011, for example, 20 percent of rent-stabilized apartments had heating equipment breakdowns, while broken plaster and peeling paint was noted at 24 percent—twice that of market-rate units. One out of three rent-stabilized units had rodent problems in 2011, compared to one in five market-rate units.

“While much of New York City’s housing stock remains in good condition and asset values have increased, significant pockets of our city’s housing are deteriorating,” Stringer said in a statement. “We still have much work to do to ensure that every New Yorker has a safe place to call home.”

Much of the city’s public housing is in a state of disrepair, Stringer’s report finds, noting problems have became far more widespread in the last decade.

Better safe than sorry?

From the Daily News:

A leaky pipe forced the shutdown of gas service to 249 apartments in a Queens housing project, the head of the tenants association said Saturday.

Residents of the Pomonok Houses in Flushing were warned that repairs could take up to two months, said irate association president Monica Corbett.

She said the gas service was shut down Thursday around 10 p.m., with NYCHA workers going from apartment to apartment to disconnect stoves and cap the pipes. NYCHA gave the residents hot plates.