$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.

NYCHA is partially privatizing

From the Daily News:

New York City’s cash-strapped public housing authority is nearing a deal to sell a 50% stake in close to 900 apartments to a pair of private developers, a spokeswoman for the agency confirmed.

Real estate giant L+M Development Partners and BFC Partners are expected to pay $150 million for the half-interest in the units, plus another $100 million for much-needed renovations in the six housing complexes, which are in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Bronx.

“This is a creative way to preserve and maintain public housing for the future and to bring in much needed money for repairs,” a Housing Authority spokeswoman said. “(The city) is leveraging the value of its properties and tapping into new capital.”

The cash infusion would raise $100 million over the next two years and another $100 million through 2029, the city says.

The deal comes as the Housing Authority has been facing yearly deficits and a backlog of over $10 billion in overdue repairs.

City Council puts kibosh on luxury condos in the projects

From the NY Times:

The New York City Council and a group of tenants sued the Bloomberg administration on Thursday over plans to lease land in public housing developments for the creation of market-rate apartments.

The lawsuit, filed in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, stems from a long-running controversy over the New York City Housing Authority’s proposal to raise revenue for repairs and capital projects by allowing private developers to build on the grounds of eight public housing projects in Manhattan.

Housing officials have given developers a Nov. 18 deadline for proposing ideas — so-called expressions of interest — but it was unclear whether they would be able to select construction projects before the change in administration that will follow the November mayoral election.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the lawsuit is intended to forestall any deals with developers before Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s term is over.

City not protecting workers doing cleanup

From the Daily News:

Extra hands hired off the street are being sent into mold-infested, storm-damaged basements in public housing to clean with highly toxic chemicals but without proper equipment, gear or training, the Daily News has learned.

The Housing Authority first asked its union partners to help with the cleaning — but union officials refused, citing the lack of training or protective clothing.

So the city hired Belchor, an outside company, to do the work.

The company would not comment, but a top official with the federal agency that oversees worker safety said workers were not properly suited up for the jobs they were performing.

“There were (personal protective equipment) issues and they are addressing (it),” said Richard Mendelson, head of the New York office of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

Mendelson’s teams have inspected job sites in Queens and Brooklyn. As of Friday, OSHA inspectors had checked 2,215 sites, finding nearly 6,000 employees — one in three — working in hazardous conditions.

Housing project becomes eyesore

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.

NYCHA shamed into installing cameras

From the Daily News:

It only took eight years and a swift kick from New York’s Hometown Newspaper, but security cameras are finally headed to 80 of the city’s most crime-ridden housing projects.

After the Daily News revealed the Housing Authority had been sitting on $42 million for security cameras, the agency finally announced Friday that installation starts in the fall. It will take until the end of next year for all of the cameras to be up and running, officials said.

The announcement came less than two hours after a reporter pressed NYCHA Chairman John Rhea for a timetable as he left his swank Harlem condo building, where a “virtual doorman” keeps residents safe.

“This is an incredibly important issue for our residents. These aren’t issues we have swept under the rug,” he said outside the upscale SoHo North development.

A Daily News investigation discovered that City Council members and other pols have earmarked tens of millions of dollars for cameras, but NYCHA hasn’t installed a single one — even as crime is on the rise. Some of the taxpayer money had been set aside as far back as 2004.

City downsizing senior citizens' apartments

From the Times Ledger:

Lawmakers blasted the city Monday for its policy of forcing residents as old as 90 out of their longtime homes in Pomonok Houses to make space for larger families.

In the middle of last month, the New York City Housing Authority sent out letters to some residents of the complex, at 67-10 Parsons Blvd., informing them that they had to leave their homes. If they did not request a smaller apartment by Dec. 5, they would risk being moved anywhere in the borough.

Lila Poris has lived in the same apartment for 51 years. She and her husband raised two children in the two-bedroom unit, but the younger generation moved out long ago to start families of their own and her husband died about five years ago.

“My whole life is tied up here,” said the 84-year-old woman, who just had a hip replacement and now lives alone in an apartment that used to house a family of four. “It’s criminal.”

In mid-November she — along with what politicians estimate is 200 others in the complex — received the letter from NYCHA explaining that her apartment was underused and she was required under her lease to move to a smaller unit so another family could occupy her unit.

A subsequent letter said much of the same thing, but ended with a bold-face sentence: “If you do not submit the completed Tenant Request for Transfer indicating your transfer choice within the next ten days, you will be placed on a waiting list for the first appropriate size apartment that becomes available in your borough; you will not have any choice.”

Window guards, elevators not being inspected

From Metro:

After a 2-year-old girl fell out of a fifth-floor window that her mother said did not have mandatory safety bars, an audit by City Comptroller John Liu alleges that the city is too often lax when it comes to checking that bars are installed.

According to city law, landlords must install window guards if a child 10 years old or younger lives in the building.

The Department of Health fielded 37,148 window guard violations from 2007 to 2009. They then directed the Department of Housing Preservation and Development to follow up. Yet, after looking at a sample — 632 — of those violations, Liu found that HPD closed nearly half of them, 288, without ever verifying with the tenant that bars were indeed installed. An HPD spokesman said inspectors did indeed return to check — they just weren’t always allowed in by tenants.

From the Daily News:

Nearly three years after a 5-year-old died trying to escape a stalled housing project elevator, whistleblowing city inspectors say they're being told to fake reports and take safety shortcuts.

The city Housing Authority vowed to get on top of elevator safety after Jacob Neuman fell 10 stories to his death in August 2008 trying to squeeze out of a stuck lift at a Brooklyn project.

Years later, six inspectors have come forward to say the system remains unsafe because bosses pressure them to close inspections without doing a thorough job.

They say supervisors are obsessed with meeting a daily quota of six inspections a man, often ordering them to move to the next job without shutting dangerous elevators and waiting for a mechanic, as NYCHA rules dictate.

One veteran inspector who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation said he was under constant pressure not to pull the plug on unsafe elevators.

"I told them somebody's wife could be riding on that elevator, somebody's kid," he said. "They didn't want to hear it."

Public housing residents behind on their rent

From the NY Times:

In a sign of the toll the dismal economy has taken on working families in New York, more than 1 in 10 households living in public housing owe at least one month in back rent, a rise of nearly 50 percent over the past year.

Though the city has always had to deal with a number of public housing tenants who are chronically late with their rent, housing officials are now confronting a significant rise in longtime tenants who never before missed a payment but are falling behind, in many cases because they have lost their jobs.

Across the city, tenants of nearly 22,000 public housing apartments, or about 12 percent of the total, owed back rent as of Aug. 31, according to the New York City Housing Authority, which runs the largest public housing system in the United States. The comparable figure in August 2009 was about 15,200.

“When you have, like any landlord, a laser-beam focus on rent collection, you sometimes miss the bigger picture,” said John B. Rhea, the housing authority’s chairman. “What’s happening is that we’re seeing substantial increases in the number of people not paying their rent on time.”

The problem is the worst in Queens, where the number of households owing back rent increased nearly 70 percent between August 2009 and last month, to 2,424 from 1,431. In six of the public housing developments in the western part of the borough, more tenants missed payments than anyplace else in the city, according to Housing Authority statistics. At the Astoria Houses, for example, the number more than doubled, to 157 households from 64; the latest number is 14 percent of the development’s 1,103 apartments.

Ceiling hole fixed

From NY1:

One Queens renter is happy to be rid of a gaping hole inside his apartment after contacting NY1. Our Susan Jhun filed the following "NY1 For You" follow-up report.

Queens resident Manuel Peguero says he's happy that a huge hole is no longer right over his head.

"Before I cannot use the bathroom because whole water coming down soon as they flush the toilet upstairs," Peguero says.

Peguero says it's been going on ever since a large piece of his bathroom ceiling directly over his toilet collapsed in June. He says every time the tenant above him flushes his toilet, water drips down through the hole not only making a mess but also rotting away his already broken ceiling.

Peguero contacted "NY1 For You" last week after three months of trying to get the city's housing authority to fix his ceiling with no luck. The station reached out to NYCHA and they sent inspectors to Peguero's apartment and fixed the leak and hole immediately.

Hole in the ceiling a big headache

From NY1:

One morning, Queens resident Manuel Peguero entered his bathroom to find that a huge gaping hole was right over his head.

"One morning it just all came down," says Lucy Peguero, the renter's granddaughter. "And luckily he wasn’t there, because he really would have gotten injured."

Lucy Peguero says the large piece of ceiling directly over her grandfather's toilet collapsed in June, and for the past three months she and her grandfather have been calling the New York City Housing Authority to try and get it fixed.

"They had two people come out here, followed by several phone calls, and nothing's ever been resolved," says Lucy Peguero.

To make matters worse, the hole leaks.

"Every time the people upstairs flush their toilet, it comes down in a little bit of a stream and there’s a puddle of water that collects over the toilet and onto the floor," says the granddaughter.

The steady stream has contributed to mold in the ceiling.

"I’m starting to notice that the edges of the hole are just getting more yellow and they’re getting worse, which signals to me that more is coming down," says Lucy Peguero. "So it’s only a matter time before the dripping water just affects the ceiling and everything falls down on his head."

"Very dangerous, because this is coming down. And how it’s affecting myself, I don’t know -- contamination," says Manuel Peguero.

He says on top of the obvious safety issue, there is a terrible smell coming from the hole.

Out of frustration, Manuel Peguero called NY1 For You and the station reached out to NYCHA. The agency sent inspectors to the man's apartment immediately and fixed the leak.

Now NYCHA is in the process of patching up the hole in Peguero's ceiling. It is a relief to the renter, who is just happy to be done with this whole mess.

Kitties trapped at housing project without food or water

From the NY Post:

A group of cats trapped in the bowels of a Queens housing complex might be down to their last lives.

Contractors hired by the New York City Housing Authority to seal up crawl spaces and keep out hundreds of stray kitties at the 2,100-unit Ravenswood Houses in Long Island City closed the cubicles before all of the cats could get out, residents and animal activists said yesterday.

By one count, as many as 12 cats are stuck in the small, hot crawl spaces of several buildings and worried feline lovers want the city to bust back in and break them out.

Debi Romano, president of SaveKitty Foundation, a local animal-rescue group, said workers hurried through the Ravenswood project before making sure all the cats were safely out.

"They rushed through the job in four days," Romano said. "This job should have taken at least two weeks. Either they're lying or they're not looking hard enough."

A Housing Authority spokeswoman, Sheila Stainback, said that no cats were stuck in the crawl spaces when the areas were sealed. But she said traps with food and water have been left in the basement areas in case any cats get back in.

Romano is urging city officials to take a closer look, insisting the cats are still there, and that most of them are too smart to be lured into the traps.

Housing authority allows kittens to starve

From the Daily News:

Animal advocates say a cat-astrophe is brewing at the Ravenswood Houses.

It's kitten season, and dozens of felines and their litters are hunkered down in crawlspaces beneath buildings that straddle the border of Long Island City and Astoria.

But the latest plan by the New York City Housing Authority, which manages Ravenswood, to trap and remove the cats, hit a snag last week.

Housing Authority workers started installing one-way doors on the crawlspaces. Cats could get out but they couldn't get back in.

Mother cats, who ventured out in search of food, were unable to get back into the space to feed and care for their helpless kittens.

Section 8 program may run out of money

From the NY Times:

Because of a $45 million budget gap, the New York City Housing Authority may have to revoke rental-assistance vouchers from more than 10,000 low-income tenants, a drastic move that could cause families to lose their apartments.

The federal government gave the housing authority less money for the voucher program, known as Section 8, than the authority expected. But the authority made matters worse by continuing to issue new vouchers until December, eight months after the government warned it to stop doing so because the program was likely to run a deficit.

Michael P. Kelly, the authority’s general manager, said that terminating vouchers would be a last resort. The authority has not decided who might lose their vouchers, but if the deficit is not closed, the cuts could begin this summer.

The agency is seeking federal and state funding to avert the voucher cuts. But the state is facing a huge deficit. Sandra Henriquez, an assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, said that HUD would review the housing authority’s books, but she added that “they cannot and should not expect that the federal government will cover the shortfall.”

As an alternative, the housing authority is considering reducing the value of each voucher, meaning that landlords, tenants or both would have to absorb the cost.

Under Section 8, residents typically pay 30 percent of their income toward rent, and the voucher covers the balance. In New York City, about 102,000 families now have vouchers, which are administered by the authority and allow families to live in units where private landlords accept Section 8 benefits. An additional 178,000 or so families live in public housing complexes owned by the authority.

After the authority voided 2,600 outstanding vouchers in December, prompting an outcry from affected families, it urged people to apply for public housing, although the waiting list is years long.

HUD provides money for the Section 8 vouchers and tells housing authorities the maximum number they can use. In May, HUD told the New York City Housing Authority it was in danger of exceeding its allotted number.

NYCHA getting bailed out

From NY1:

Public housing is about to get a big boost from the federal government.

The New York City Housing Authority is set to announce $210 million in private funding, and another $65 to $75 million in annual federal funding.

The money will go toward renovating and maintaining more than 20,000 public housing units in 21 complexes.

As part of the deal, the 21 developments are being sold into a public-private partnership with Citigroup, reports say.

NYCHAS, which will still manage the developments, says the partnership was the only way to obtain the financing, and officials say they will remain low-income housing.

Critics say the move could be the first step toward privatization of the complexes.

City makes convenient repairs

From the NY Times:

The residents of the Bedford-Stuyvesant Rehabs, a group of three buildings, said they had complained for years about poor conditions to their landlord, the New York City Housing Authority. They had scheduled a press conference on Thursday to air their grievances and urge the agency to make fixes.

Then, the night before, a curious thing happened: A squad of 8 to 12 repairmen from the housing authority descended on their buildings, the tenants said, patching holes and painting walls.

Anti-crime cameras to be installed at Pomonok

From the Queens Gazette:

Pomonok Houses in Flushing, a city Housing Authority development, is set to get an infusion of $700,000 to install closed circuit television cameras in buildings that have been identified by the police department as high crime buildings, two Flushing lawmakers announced.

Assemblymember Nettie Mayersohn said she has acquired $500,000 in capital funding for the anti-crime project and state Senator Toby Ann Stavisky received $200,000 in state funds for the project. Stavisky’s funds will be used for the installation of additional cameras in strategic places.

The goal of the funding, the Democratic lawmakers said in a release, is to begin installing cameras in high-crime buildings to reduce crime and improve the quality of life for the residents of the targeted buildings.

Stavisky added. “The residents of Pomonok Houses deserve the peace of mind and security that these surveillance cameras will offer in terms of crime deterrence.” Stavisky added. “The residents of Pomonok Houses deserve the peace of mind and security that these surveillance cameras will offer in terms of crime deterrence.” The cameras, they said, would be strategically placed in specially designated areas that are prone to criminal activity, such as building lobbies, including mail boxes and elevators, interior elevator cabs and building entrances and exits, and also the building exteriors.

NYC Revoking More Than 3,000 Housing Vouchers

NEW YORK (AP) -- New York City has to revoke more than 3,000 vouchers that poor residents were counting on to help pay for housing.

The New York City Housing Authority said Thursday it has to void 3,018 subsidized housing vouchers known as Section 8. They had already been distributed to people who were counting on them.

The housing authority said it had to pull the vouchers because Congress cut $58 million from its Section 8 budget last spring. There has also been less turnover in the program and more of a demand than expected.

The housing authority gives out about 100,000 vouchers per year. The average voucher is for $800 a month.

Developing every open space in existence

From City Limits:

What should New York City do with its public housing? Demolish it, as public housing authorities in cities like Newark, Chicago and Detroit have done? Sell it, as private-market advocates propose? Or watch it continue to deteriorate as the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) struggles with deficits brought by cutbacks in state and federal support?

These are critical questions for the city because with nearly 180,000 apartments spread over five boroughs, NYCHA is New York's largest landlord. And in a city where housing for low- and moderate-income people is so desperately needed, public housing provides a vital service. Even if the buildings are getting old. Even if the elevators don't always work. Even if the vast superblocks typical of most housing projects are banal in design, barren of amenity and often empty and intimidating at night.

This year, an international team of graduate students from the University of Michigan Master of Urban Design Program spent a semester exploring the redevelopment potential of public housing projects on the Lower East Side, one of the greatest concentrations of such projects in the country.

They proposed that the projects' open spaces (more than 80 percent of their land area) be used for development that 1) retains all public housing in the area; 2) provides new revenue streams for NYCHA that can be used to maintain and enhance its housing stock; 3) creates the kind of economically integrated communities preferred by the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development in its public-housing demolition and replacement program, HOPE VI; and 4) uses development to increase project residents' social and economic opportunities.

Okay...sewers, parks, schools, electricity, police...where are we building those? Do these things not matter?

Eight months without hot water

From the Daily News:

Tenants in a Bedford-Stuyvesant housing development say they’ve been without hot water for eight months — and that countless calls to fix the problem were ignored by city officials.

Residents in one Kingsborough Houses building at 708 Seventh Walk said the lack of hot water has forced them to wake up at 4 every morning to boil water for bathing.

“It’s like living in a Third World country,” said Maggie Davis, 61, who each morning made repeated trips from the stove to the bathtub carrying 27 pounds of scalding hot water in a large pot.