NYCHA’s cold shoulder
For a wrenching few opening minutes of a Tuesday City Council hearing on sputtering heating systems that have plunged a stunning 80% of New York City Housing Authority homes into the cold so far this winter, tenants got to tell their stories, while NYCHA Chairwoman Shola Olatoye had to sit and listen.
Said one from the Breukelen Houses: “We’re not refugees, we’re not third-class citizens, we will not be treated as savages.”
Spoken loud and clear — in contrast to the empty bureaucratic platitudes Olatoye mustered and the appalling suggestion from the chairwoman and Mayor de Blasio that the cold, the mold, the vermin and the lead paint amount to the best that a financially strapped city can muster, what with federal funding at low tide.
As Olatoye put it, “The failure of our equipment during the extraordinary weather conditions is exactly what disinvestment looks like.”
As de Blasio put it: “People in public housing deserve the very best living standard we can give them with the money we have.”
That’s right: The people in charge of managing this massive bureaucracy are pleading poverty, and expecting the actual poor people at their mercy to hunker down in conditions that would get a private landlord fined to high heaven.
City Council members attempted to fill the glaring void of personal responsibility and political imagination.
Bronx Councilman Mark Gnonaj suggested a shift to less costly private management. Queens Councilman Barry Grodenchik, raised in the Pomonok Houses, urged including NYCHA in de Blasio’s program to build or preserve 300,000 apartments — a number the mayor just months ago boosted from 200,000, costing $1.3 billion a year.
Had NYCHA been part of the plan, past-theirexpiration-date boilers and pipes, in need of $2.25 billion replacement, could have gotten more money sooner than the $200 million put in the city budget last week.
Instead, four years ago, de Blasio made a fateful choice to affix his signature and dollars to an expensive new housing program, while taking NYCHA’s fragile health for granted.
He has a moral obligation now to do better than tell tenants that they’re lucky to have the hovels they’ve got. If, that is, he’s anything like the progressive he claims to be.