Today, in simultaneous live broadcasts beginning at 10 a.m., officials will count ballots cast by Brooklyn residents of the NYCHA Unity Towers and Coney Island Houses developments to determine tenants’ choices for the future of their buildings.
There are three options: stay in Section 9, move to PACT’s private management structure, or join the Housing Preservation Trust, which Albany created to allow NYCHA to leverage federal Section 8 funds and be more agile in contracting, among other things. These are the third and fourth such votes after residents of Nostrand Houses and the Bronx River Addition overwhelmingly joined the Trust. We hope this morning’s results show the same result.
The votes are in on the future and sustainability The units, which provide a lifeline to hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers, are one thing most residents, advocates and politicians agree on: The long-standing ways of doing business aren’t working, and failure to take steps to ensure the authority’s sustainability will have irreversible consequences.
Already, residents, including the elderly and disabled, are forced to live without working elevators, intermittent heat, vermin, health-threatening mold, and lead. These factors can have indelible consequences; a child exposed to lead at a young age can expect to have a lower educational level virtually indefinitely. This is not only a failure, it is a disgrace to our city, which has a responsibility to these tenants. We would not accept these results from a private landlord, and we should not accept them from a government entity.
Change is always scary, especially when it involves something as personal as your own home. But the Trust’s change is not intended to alter the core promise of NYCHA housing: that residents will have a place to live that is affordable.
NYCHA will still own the homes, and the Trust is a publicly owned corporation, similar to the MTA, with no shareholders and no profit motive. The change is actually meant to better deliver on that promise, giving residents the same thing, but with more responsive management and greater funding flexibility to not only fix things, but fix them sustainably.
We know that deferred repairs are only getting more complicated and more expensive — a big part of the reason NYCHA’s projected costs to bring all projects back into good repair have skyrocketed. a staggering $80 billion — investments made today will also allow the authority to prepare for fewer budgetary difficulties in the future.
So far, NYCHA residents have given their approval, and we hope that today the Trust will win two more victories. Let the momentum continue in the next round of voting on Hylan Houses and other NYCHA projects. The results may not be seen or felt immediately, but that should not discourage residents as they make their choice.
