De Blasio unveils 10-year NYCHA plan
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s ambitious plan to prop up public housing may share some similarities with former mayor Michael Bloomberg’s, but he’d much prefer you compare him to someone else.
In 1934, “the greatest mayor we ever had, Fiorello LaGuardia,” created the New York City Housing Authority, de Blasio said.
LaGuardia “believed that something bold and ambitious and transcendent had to happen to protect the interests of working New Yorkers,” said the mayor, and his administration is, “humbly, humbly presenting Next Generation NYCHA in that same spirit.”
On Tuesday, de Blasio rolled out his 10-year Next Generation plan to fix New York City’s public housing—first via the New York Times, and then to the rest of the press corp at a public housing development in East Harlem.
If successful, the plan would eliminate the agency’s operating deficit, which was expected to reach $200 million a year by 2020, but leave more than $10 billion in unfunded capital needs.
“We’re trying to recognize that which we know we can achieve,” de Blasio said.
Without the plan, the city estimates NYCHA’s unmet capital needs are at roughly $17 billion over five years.
Like Bloomberg’s more modest proposal, which de Blasio killed upon taking office, de Blasio would find revenue by leasing parcels of underutilized NYCHA land to developers who, in turn, would build housing.
Unlike the Bloomberg proposal, which called for 80 percent of that housing to be market rate (with the assumption that market rate housing would throw off more revenue for NYCHA), de Blasio’s plan puts a much heavier emphasis on “affordable” infill, calling for buildings where either all units are affordable or where 50 percent are affordable and 50 percent are market rate.
De Blasio expects this to generate between $400 million and $800 million over 10 years.
“Mayor, you were a critic of the previous mayor’s infill plan,” said one reporter, noting the de Blasio plan "looks very, very similar to his, perhaps a higher [ratio] of affordable housing …”
“Perhaps?” an incredulous-sounding de Blasio said, cutting the reporter off. “I would say quite a higher ratio. I appreciate the editorialization of the question. You’re very good at that. This is a very different plan.”
To cut NYCHA’s costs, the city has agreed to stop collecting the annual police payment and the Payment in Lieu of Taxes from NYCHA. And the city has agreed to take some of NYCHA’s staff on the city payroll and accept NYCHA repair calls through it’s 311 call center, eliminating NYCHA’s own customer call center.
NYCHA plans to raise revenue by increasing parking rates and rent collection from tenants.
NYCHA will also look into moving some of its smaller buildings, called scatter site, and buildings which are more costly to renovate than to demolish and rebuild, to other funding sources like the federal Rental Assistance Demonstration program and federal tenant protection vouchers.
Although it’s not in the plan, city officials hope that after they address the operating budget deficit, they can get bonds to address some or all of the remaining capital gap.
De Blasio said he was pursuing all of these measures, because there is no alternative.
“This is, at this moment, the worst financial crisis in the history of NYCHA,” he said.
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