In voting now underway, the 2,000 residents of NYCHA’s Nostrand Houses in Brooklyn will get a say in their future. Unlike most elections, though, this one won’t feature competing candidates, but rather competing visions of their own home’s management and leasing structure, between the status quo Section 9 structure, the private-management structure of the federal RAD program (called PACT in NYC), and the brand new option of the Public Housing Preservation Trust.
They should choose the latter, the best bet to contend with the system’s massive capital needs.
That each iteration of the program must be voted in by residents might seem to some like an unnecessary delay in implementing a program that is much needed to help stabilize NYCHA’s teetering finances, but that’s a category error in thinking. We have to remember what and who this system is for in the first place: it’s for the residents to have somewhere to live; excluding them would be quicker but miss the point of stabilizing the system, while engendering mistrust among the folks who live there.
Instead, it is incumbent on organizers and elected officials to make the case for why the Trust is the right choice, overcoming any legitimate doubts that residents might have about changing the financing that have undergirded their housing, sometimes for their whole lives, and highlighting the good.
It is a fact that the Trust will not modify any of the underlying aspects of NYCHA tenancy; residents won’t be required to pay more, their apartments won’t be subject to removal from the public housing rolls, the same succession system remains and the buildings will continue to be owned and primarily operated by NYCHA itself.
The Trust would receive long-term leases and, crucially, both unlock federal Section 8 funding and have more maneuverability to contract services like needed repairs, a principle that many tenants can no doubt get behind as they’ve seen elevators out for hours or days, heat lacking, mold running rampant and other consequences of both underfunding and a byzantine contracting process.
NYCHA itself is being properly judicious in giving tenants facts about their choices without trying to overtly influence results, but we have no such constraints. If you’re living in a NYCHA building and you get a chance to vote, you should take this opportunity to use your voice, and we recommend you use it to approve the Trust, which can revamp things for the better.
It’s now on the city to move fast in scheduling more such elections in the next year, giving residents of developments large and small the chance to join the next step for the storied system, which has survived through budget crises, terrorism, natural disasters, a pandemic and all manner of other challenges.
It hasn’t always had the best management or the most supportive elected officials, but throughout it all, NYC has stood by our public housing, one of the only things that enables thousands of New Yorkers to stay and raise families here.
The law allows for up to 25,000 units to be rehabilitated via the Trust, and the conversions can’t come soon enough to help fill needs that have run into the tens of billions of dollars. It won’t solve every problem, but it’ll go a long way towards solving the big one.
from New York Daily News https://ift.tt/hsXHGyJ