Outside of its dedicated housing for the poor, NYCHA also administers “Section 8” vouchers that can bridge affordable-housing gaps by giving tens of thousands of struggling families subsidies for renting in the private housing market. According to studies by New York University’s Furman Center, nearly 80 percent of low-income households struggle to pay rent, with many stuffed into overcrowded apartments. NYCHA’s budget constraints have for the past decade kept it from expanding to meet the city’s deep needs for affordable housing, which the volatile economy has further exacerbated in recent years. Last year, Superstorm Sandy heaped even more damage onto already dilapidated buildings. On top of the heavy cuts, NYCHA faces a groaning backlog of hundreds of thousands of repair requests, with many families waiting years for basic sink and electrical repairs. Though the City Council has since pledged some funds to shrink the shortfall to about $ 150 million, the infusion is aimed at just keeping basic community facilities open and staffed, including dozens of NYCHA-run senior centers. Earlier this year, the deficit kamikaze of federal sequestration blasted a $ 200 million hole in NYCHA’s budget. The pro-business administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg points out to disgruntled tenants that the agency itself is strapped for cash. Still, despite Clifton’s sense that costs are rising above what her neighbors can afford, the city’s public housing system remains an increasingly isolated bastion of low rents: tenants pay an average of $ 436 per month and the average resident household income is roughly $ 23, 000 a year. There’s people in there paying $ 1, 000… housing used to be for low-rent people.” Under NYCHA’s rent rates, Clifton said, “The more money you make, the more they take.
But Clifton said even with government support, housing costs still put a squeeze on tenants.
Unlike the city’s unregulated private rental market, NYCHA housing is largely geared toward lower-income households, with rents set according to residents’ ability to pay (based on a federal formula that adjusts costs around a threshold of about 30 percent of income).
Rose Clifton, who is pushing 80 and serves as Resident Association President of Brooklyn’s Park Rock development, came to the protests to voice frustration with inadequate funding and neglected repair needs, like mold and floods, in addition to an overall sense that the city was neglecting poor tenants even as they struggle with the rising rents. Many housing activists fear the plan would pave the way for even more assaults on the city’s embattled public housing system and enable real estate financiers to consume more and more public-owned and community-oriented spaces. But the focal point of the protests was the city’s proposal to lease 14 parcels of NYCHA land, scattered on eight housing complexes across the city, to private developers. In late July, New Yorkers from low and modest-income neighborhoods gathered at Pace University in Lower Manhattan to air their grievances against the city’s public housing authority, NYCHA.ĭisplaying signs proclaiming “Housing is a Human Right” and “Save Meltzer Park,” many in the crowd came to speak out about day-to-day struggles like rising rents and deteriorating buildings. At Smith Houses, for example, residents from the Latino and Chinese communities, which usually tend to occupy separate cultural spheres on the Lower East Side, have begun organizing together for more and better affordable housing. The upshot to NYCHA’s pro-corporate overhaul plan is that it has inspired new neighborhood alliances of opposition.