Plugged-in monitor
Capping a five-year tenure as a federally appointed monitor for NYCHA, the nation’s largest and beleaguered public housing system, Bart Schwartz has bid farewell in a 100page report of observations and takeaways. If Schwartz has one main pearl of wisdom here, it’s the folly of reacting to problems as they fester instead of dealing with them quickly on the front end or, better yet, foreseeing them and putting processes in place to prevent the issue from ever arising at all.
This goes for everything from literal emergency infrastructural problems like loss of heat and leaking pipes to the macro-level management of the agency, which he faults for being lethargic and reactive in a way that has not only allowed problems to persist but ballooned their price tags.
To save pennies, the city has for years permitted the authority to deteriorate to the point that mere maintenance is no longer an option, requiring expensive, time-consuming and disruptive overhaul.
Election year visits by candidates to NYCHA buildings are largely useless, but we can’t help but wonder if the lack of urgency stems in part from the distance the agency’s leaders have from the routine struggles of residents. For elderly and disabled residents in particular, a busted elevator or an inoperative boiler are not just numbers on a spreadsheet, but a risk to daily life. Ditto for families with children in apartments with mold or lead, or any number of other deficiencies in the system.
As Schwartz notes, neither the use of the RAD program to transfer management over to private entities nor the new Housing Preservation Trust are by themselves solutions to the problems that plague the system. The latter in particular is geared towards unlocking additional federal funding, and while readers may assume we disagree with him on account of our frequent boosterism of the trust, we are in fact in total consensus.
No administrative tool and no cash infusion can alone put the authority on the right path unless properly utilized and maximized. Yes, there are tens of billions of dollars required to make the system livable for its hundreds of thousands of tenants, but only if it’s money well spent.
Like the monitor, though, we are hopeful that we might be at a time where NYCHA’s slow decline may be slowed and, with proper effort and political will, reversed.
The trust won’t fix the issues, but as more residents elect to put their faith in the new entity, that tool can and must be validated by leaders using the new funds and additional contracting and management powers to address the stubborn inefficiency of the system, which has a tendency to maintain staffs whose sense of duty and urgency seem, in a word, lacking.
The recent bribery scandal that the feds blew up has generated headlines and become a sort of go-to example of the system’s ineptitude, but NYCHA’s problem goes well beyond a few dozen supervisors illegally taking kickbacks. A general lack of accountability for good outcomes, ranging from on-the-ground personnel to the C-suite, is a cultural issue that has only begun to get turned around.
A combination of cultural shift, oversight and accountability metrics and the tools provided by new programs like the trust will light the way forward.