‘Sticker shock’ as the cost of repairs soar

The sorry condition of city public housing is even worse than NYCHA thought.

In 2011, officials estimated it would take $17 billion over five years to address the “physical needs” of the authority’s 175,000 apartments.

In January, that estimate had ballooned to $25 billion, and now it’s $31.8 billion – a figure City Hall has known about since March but did not release until Monday.

The latest figure, first reported by Politico New York, reflects the drastic state of the nation’s biggest public housing authority.

Citizens Budget Commission President Carol Kellermann said Monday the alarming new figure makes it clear that small incremental adjustments to NYCHA’s management plan won’t work.

“To address NYCHA’s astounding $32 billion in capital needs over the next five years, radical changes need to be undertaken immediately,” she said. “Without dramatic change, by 2027, 90% of NYCHA’s housing units will have declined to the point at which they are at risk of no longer being cost-effective to repair.”

At an afternoon press briefing, Interim NYCHA Chairman Stanley Brezenoff (top photo) and NYCHA Vice President for Capital Projects Deborah Goddard (bottom photo) admitted the scope of the needed repairs is daunting.

“There was sticker shock even though we knew it was going to go up,” Goddard said, noting that the cost of some needed repairs skyrocketed because prior estimates were way off. Elevator upgrade estimates, for instance, jumped from $28 million in 2011 to $1.5 billion due to a more sophisticated analysis by a consultant with actual elevator maintenance expertise.

The biggest chunk of that five-year cost is the $12.6 billion needed to fix up thousands of squalid apartments, including replacing deteriorating kitchens and bathrooms. That’s followed by the $10.7 billion needed to upgrade building exteriors, including brickwork, roofs and windows.

At the beginning of the year, NYCHA managers had estimated during testimony to the City Council that the cost to address all of the authority’s physical needs was $25 billion. The higher estimate of $31.8 billion arrived in March, but they did not make it public.

At the time, City Hall and NYCHA were in negotiations to resolve a longrunning investigation by the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office of NYCHA’s mismanagement. That probe was settled June 11 with the release of a damning complaint detailing NYCHA’s pattern of covering up its failures and an agreement to bring in a court-appointed monitor to oversee the authority.

The ongoing deterioration of NYCHA apartments and buildings is a major reason for the big bump in repair costs. The physical needs assessment, drafted by consultants STV and AECOM, estimated that it has added $5.2 billion to the overall cost.

During the inspections that led to the report, the consultants discovered multiple hazardous conditions such as gas leaks, clogged sewer drains, defective bolts on metal fire escape ladders, nonfunctional fire sprinklers and broken windows.