Most people reading this were probably fortunate enough to be raised with a roof over their heads. Whatever that roof may have been, it protected you from rain, it kept you warm, it sheltered you from the dangers of the outside world.
But what happens when that roof is leaking? What happens when the walls have peeling lead paint chips, there’s asbestos in the floors and mold in the bedroom? What happens when the agency directly responsible for these conditions turns to the private sector to take over, rather than holding itself accountable?
Birthed of necessity, the projects are the child of government inaction. From their inception in the days of the Great Depression to today’s crumbling brown brick buildings, public housing has been designed to withstand hardship; however, nowadays this resilience is being tested. The public developments of today are a shadow of what they used to be, and it’s being felt throughout the system. From privatization to defunding and backlogs of repair tickets, the system is collapsing in on itself. How is the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), on whose programs the city’s most vulnerable rely, going to fare against the tidal wave of challenges it faces? Will the system be able to sustain itself, despite billions in backlogged repairs, wages lowering, and destroyed infrastructure — as a result of NYCHA’s own mismanagement?
To combat the destruction, NYCHA is in the process of privatizing its properties, but will handing off control of its buildings to major conglomerates protect tenants and finally get them the repairs they need?
PACT stands for Permanent Affordability Commitment Together, the New York City extension of the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) initiative; it was created out of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act, and its additions starting from 2012 onwards. In everyman’s terms, this initiative seeks to help the destroyed public housing network in the United States by handing off management of the properties to private corporations. NYCHA has made major progress in privatizing many of its developments, but this comes at a cost.
In a recent report by the New York City Comptroller, PACT sites have almost the same eviction rate as the citywide average than NYCHA itself, at around 0.6%, while NYCHA’s sits at around 0.1%. While recent reports show repairs are being carried out, PACT landlords are diligent about rent collection and, considering almost 40 percent of NYCHA renters are in arrears, renters are at a higher risk of eviction under more stringent rent collection.
Things aren’t much better for NYCHA Section 9 (standard public housing) residents. A CBS investigation published in May of 2024 found, on average, NYCHA repairs take 370 days, or just over a year. This leaves residents with quickly deteriorating homes in a system that cannot fix them; many times the tenants just make the repairs themselves, like retired handyman and Marine Lewis, who lives in the seventh building of the James Weldon Johnson Houses, who said “I do construction and demolition and I work plumbing, and to be honest with you, these guys, I mean, they’re not plumbers, but you call them to do a simple stoppage to unclog a sink or a toilet or a tub that’s more important and they take a long time, sometimes they don’t even come, they lie. […] I do the job myself anyway, I got my own equipment, but I ain’t supposed to, I ain’t gotta pay for that.” This poses major dangers to residents, who have to wait lengthy periods of time to get essential repairs, like replacing air conditioners, refrigerators, and broken windows.
An interviewee and resident of the Johnson housing complex, who chose to stay anonymous, has been dealing with a broken window since the beginning of winter 2024: “When they came about the fire alarms, I asked about my window, and they said, ‘you have to make a whole different call for that, because where my window is broken where my AC is, so that means they have to take out the whole AC and replace my window […] if they can barely come in for repainting, they are not gonna fucking fix my window.”
The interviewee is yet to make a call to her building to repair the window, resorting to having her father repair the window himself: “in between the separation of the two window panes, right in between it he put a rag so the top part doesn’t keep falling.”
Slow repair times are just a small part of larger building repair and safety issues — NYCHA has been caught in a years — long battle with lead, asbestos, and mold. In a damning report by The City, NYCHA was revealed to have lied about the lead-free status of over 84,000 units, being forced to begin re-testing in 2018.
Lewis from Johnson’s building seven is stuck with NYCHA’s inability to deal with its lead problem: “I retired last year, and I’m just enjoying my life, I had cancer and everything, but um, the lead! I know my apartment has lead, because the only thing they do, it’s not like downtown, downtown, when they paint your apartment — like I said I do a lot of construction — you know they strip the paint, down to the last — to the main break or whatever it is, sheetrock or whatever, over here they don’t do that, they paint over the paint. So, if I was about to do the job myself, I would have to be careful, I would have to have masks, asbestos masks, ‘cause there ain’t no telling.”
Lead can cause brain damage, lowered IQ, and learning/behavioral problems, which is a threat to the health and safety of the nearly 150,000 families living in NYCHA as of 2023. NYCHA willingly ignoring lead is comparable to the agency declaring it does ike them saying they do not care about the futures of the children they are supposed to protect. This extends beyond lead to, as City Limits reports, literally almost every public health and safety issue imaginable, like broken elevators, asbestos, and severe mold infestations.
Crumbling infrastructure and unsafe living conditions may vary from complex to complex, but when things get bad, they get really bad, as detailed in a recent report from The Riverdale Press when they examined the Fort Independence houses in Bronx. One of the building’s entrances had been jammed open, leading to homeless people coming in to sleep in the stairwell and defecate on the roof. Moreover, the walls and ceilings in several apartments were cracking, and in one apartment, a woman had to fill her bedroom with buckets to collect fluids coming through her ceiling.
The dismal state of NYCHA Section 9 buildings ties into a larger issue: government unwillingness to fund public services. A recent New York Times study found actual average spending per person for the nationwide Medicare program has plateaued for the last ten years. The Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation published a blog post on a government funding bill that narrowly avoided a government shutdown, discussing the four different childhood cancer research bills which were cut from the final bill, with three still in limbo; this comes with infamous union-buster and world’s richest man Elon Musk threatening GOP senators to vote against the bill until more spending was cut from it — the world’s richest country is actively working to cut spending to help its most at-risk citizens.
The National Low Income Housing Coalition reported that, from 1978 to today, federal funding for public housing has dropped from around 1.4 percent of the national GDP to around 0.25 percent, resulting in disrepair nationally, due to reduced staff and less money for comprehensive repairs. NAHRO, the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials estimated, in its overview of American housing programs, NAHRO 360, that the Capital Fund backlog was around $90 billion dollars.
Macrotrends.net, a market analyzing service, reported military spending in 2022, a year with no wars in which the USA was directly involved, surpassed that of 2011, when the USA was directly involved in two wars; with almost a trillion dollars poured into a fighting force struggling to find a force to fight without having to hand out large bonuses, it might be time to question whether or not we should decrease funding for our military and invest in other programs that help Americans.
The Reynolds Center for Business Journalism reported that, of the $816.7 billion allotted to the military in the National Defense Authorization Act (2022), $389.5 billion was to be spent on military contracts with private defense contractors like Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and others. We live in a country where, instead of funding public services and programs that help the general public, we instead throw money at companies that profit off death. If we live in a country that prioritizes putting money in the pockets of corporations rather than putting a roof over the heads of its own citizens, how do we expect the government to intervene and give public housing the money it needs to stay up and running?
The threat of international war breaking out is nowhere near as high as it was in the 20th Century, when the USA was spending significantly less than it is now and especially considering our current “enemies” are already entrenched in their own armed conflicts and our alliances with our allies act as a shield for America. So then why are we ramping up military spending? By selling ourselves out to the private defense sector, we actively deny and ignore the issues plaguing us at home.
Social Security, under our current law will run out by 2041, and unless congress steps in, we could live in a future where 50 percent of beneficiaries live in poverty, affecting mostly the lower classes. The fund is projected to lose over 150 billion dollars in 2025, money instead spent on the armed forces and its private counterparts. The effects of losing social security would not only be detrimental to seniors as a whole, but also disproportionately would affect black and hispanic people, the largest demographic of NYCHA residents at almost 90 percent of residents in Section 9 and RAD-PACT.
Considering where the system is now, how can we expect people to lead successful, fulfilling lives when their homes are underfunded, to the point that they have to make their own repairs or raise children knowing they have lead in their walls? Enshrined in the Declaration of Independence is the “unalienable right” to life, yet for public housing residents, this “right” is beginning to look different.
In building One of the James Weldon Johnson houses, father JC tells a grim tale: “It’s not a good establishment to have children in, like I think children shouldn’t belong in the Projects, this is, like, not good for them, like, the living situation, they comin’ home from school and they gotta see the piss inside the elevator, walking out the side of the building you see dirty pampers with shit in ‘em, […] it’s just not a good environment for them to be livin’ in.” With proper funding, would this be a problem?
While unsanitary conditions may be blamed on NYCHA’s extreme understaffing and lack of resources, there grows a moral question to reckon with — can we accept current conditions as the result of decades of underfunding, despite how it affects residents, or is a solution absolutely necessary despite the cost or problems that come with repairs by any means necessary. This brings us back to RAD-PACT; Gilbane, Inc., one of the partners hand-picked by NYCHA to help redevelop several NYCHA sites under the new Section 8 program, is a nationwide major corporation which reported $7.3 billion in revenue in 2023.
How can we expect a company that large to care for the wellbeing or rights of Section 8 tenants when its operations span the entire nation and mostly serve much wealthier clientele? Is reliance on the private sector really the best solution for the broken public housing system, considering the risks associated with privatization? If we consider the previously mentioned Comptroller’s report, it becomes crystal clear privatization has taken a definite toll. A corporation cannot take pity on you if you can’t make the rent for one month; a corporation can’t feel sympathy if you end up on the streets … the best it can do is complete repairs for you and make sure a roof stays over your head. Capital costs rule out the possibility of having tenants in arrears, considering what privatization really means: treating the living, breathing buildings like a company.
Perhaps these issues come down to the design of the buildings themselves. Walking through any development, it becomes obvious how these buildings were designed: to maximize efficiency and keep costs as low as possible. Walking down a hallway in any NYCHA building, you’re met with rows and rows of the same doors, in the same position on every single floor; the same floor built over and over, with the same layout, windows, and amount of space. How do you foster community?
In a lecture from the Skyscraper Museum, as part of their project, Housing Density, their speakers discussed how post WWII and mid-century style NYCHA architects were drawn to the idea of public housing as a “tower in a garden,” but lack of available land, especially in Manhattan, and low budgets forced these 1920s European modernist-inspired buildings to become something else: “complete standardization of exterior detail: red brick with standard window types and little or no elaboration such as balconies.”
Basically, 20 story buildings of just long, yellow tiled hallways with eerie fluorescents, over and over surrounded by deserted, unkept public green space and decaying facades. In most buildings there is minimal community space other than the lobby and the elevator — almost as if the buildings were built to store people rather than house them; enter through the entrance, step into the elevator, then filter out into your respective floor and apartment.
When the summer’s long gone, and the cold winter takes over the surrounding green space, where do you congregate? Where do you socialize? These spaces often have to be carved out where they don’t belong. Night by night, if you were to travel from building to building, you would encounter many instances of people sitting in their hallways to socialize, despite pipes, broken lights, fly traps, and dirty windows. How do you build community when the community is forced into entirely inhospitable spaces?
Despite all the issues that play into this collapse, what lies at the center of it all? The rent.
NYCHA rents are capped at 30 percent of the renter’s annual income; how long can this last, however, considering the nation’s poverty crisis? According to an article published in 2023 by The New York Times, the wealth gap in New York County (Manhattan) is wider than that of certain developing countries. The article reported that whilst the wealthiest 5 percent of Manhattan residents on average rake in $545,549 annually, the bottom 20 percent only make around $10,259 per year. Considering the cost of food, utilities, and other basic day-to-day expenses, losing 30 percent of your income to rent may be a price too high for some. As a result, many renters are in arrears, drastically cutting down NYCHA’s overall budget to carry out necessary repairs. This doesn’t go without mentioning that without those necessary funds, NYCHA cannot accommodate for the massive waitlist of people waiting for help in paying for private housing while they wait for NYCHA apartments to open up. The waitlist was so long, in fact, that, according to City Land, when the waitlist opened back up again in May of 2024, it had been 15 years since new applications were being accepted.
Where does this leave us? We have a system so suffocated and unable to take in new people that almost 130,000 people are sleeping each night in homeless shelters, with thousands of others stuck on the street or sleeping in the homes of family, friends and acquaintances. Those who actually make it into the public housing system are either stuck receiving rent vouchers while they wait for a Section 9 apartment to open up, or they’re stuck in deteriorating apartments in dirty, understaffed buildings. In a desperate attempt to fix things, the private sector has begun to take over the Projects, leading to evictions and harsher treatment of tenants.
“I feel like you gotta live there to understand, like, everybody that I know out there, like I know, basically everybody in Douglas, and that’s like my family. […] it’s like you know when like like your family, if somebody else will see your family, they might be like, “oh, your family is crazy,” depending on how your family is. […] But when you really get to know them, be around them a lot, it’s like damn, they’re really not that bad. So, it’s like, it’s really like everybody protects who they know, who they’re cool with, and that’s really what it is, like, everybody is just like a protector. That’s really what it is.” – Mackenzie, Douglass resident.
