HIGH-RISE PUBLIC HOUSING IS UNMANAGEABLE
Nicholas Dagen Bloom
Most Americans believe that high-rise public housing, by its very nature, is unmanageable. If this premise were true, then New York City’s public housing system should have collapsed decades ago for the simple reason that the system is dominated by large, high-rise public housing developments. More than half of NYCHA’s towers (58 percent) are seven stories or higher, with some structures, such as the four massive towers of Polo Grounds Towers (1968), reaching 30 stories. The myth that high-rise public housing is unmanageable looks solid when applied to cities such as St. Louis or Chicago, but it fails to account for the long-term experience in New York City, home to 15 percent of the nation’s traditional public housing units.1
Between 1934 and 1965, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) built sixty-nine developments (of 154 total it constructed during that time), each with at least one thousand apartments in the modernist “tower in the park” formation (Figure 4.1).2 Even “smaller” NYCHA developments from this time usually included high-rise superblocks with hundreds of units per development. In many cases, these developments were built adjacent to each other, creating public housing concentrations rivaling any in the world. Surely some of those developments should have failed as spectacularly as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis or Cabrini-Green in Chicago. But they didn’t.
Even Hurricane Sandy, which hit New York City on October 29, 2012, and was the worst storm in the region’s modern history, was not able to wipe New York’s public housing from the map. After an incomplete resident evacuation in flood-prone areas and a lot of bad press concerning tenant well-being post-storm, NYCHA employees and emergency contractors rapidly restored all the systems, or at least put in place long-term temporary fixes such as mobile boilers, even in the hardest hit areas of the Rockaways in Queens and Coney Island in southwest Brooklyn. All of the approximately eighty thousand public housing residents in the affected buildings had power and heat within one month; by contrast, some residents in conventional housing in the Rockaways ended up waiting months for basic services. In 2014, FEMA announced its first major grant, for Coney Island Houses, of $108 million dollars for rebuilding building systems and flood proofing; the scale and aim of the grant was announced as a precedent for fifteen other developments in flood zones. The difference between the experience in New Orleans (post-Katrina in 2005), when a storm was used as an opportunity to close and demolish most of the city’s public housing developments, could not be more stark.3
Figure 4.1 East River Houses (1941, 1,158 units, 2,435 residents) includes a mix of six-, ten-, and eleven-story buildings. East River Houses became a model for NYCHA design and site planning in the postwar period, often at even greater building heights. The development was still fully occupied and maintained in 2014. Photograph by author.
As of 2014, New York has twenty-six hundred public housing towers (178,557 units) that provide shelter for four hundred thousand mostly poor residents (with an average family income of approximately $23,000). Many activists, and even some NYCHA officials, believe the actual total population of these developments, including unregistered occupants, may be closer to six hundred thousand. Nearly 11,700 full-time employees tend to NYCHA apartments, buildings, and grounds. The average rent of $434 per month is significantly less than one would pay for market rent in most American cities, much less New York City. The vacancy rate for NYCHA apartments is only .6 percent, and the waiting lists for conventional public housing include over two hundred thousand families. Only 11 percent of residents are on welfare; 47 percent are working families (at least one member employed or pensioned), and the remainder, including growing numbers of seniors who head up most NYCHA families, are reliant on Social Security, pensions, or disability insurance. Violent crime in public housing remains significantly higher than in the city as a whole, and vandalism is extensive, but NYCHA developments have experienced significant and sustained crime reduction since the 1990s. Even more impressive, the surrounding neighborhoods have seen still greater drops in crime—a remarkable trend considering the big high-rise developments that loom over them.4
This successful maintenance, when acknowledged at all, is usually attributed to factors other than NYCHA management. Indeed, contextual factors that distinguish New York from other cities certainly complicate any one-to-one comparison between New York’s public housing and that in other cities: (1) the historically tight housing market means that a public housing apartment is worth getting and keeping; (2) New York City’s better financial health has provided extra policing and social services; (3) the city’s diverse economy provides jobs for many residents that are unavailable in other cities; (4) New York—both as a city and in public housing—has been and is today more diverse socially and ethnically than many other cities where public housing came to be viewed as primarily a program for poor African Americans; (5) politicians citywide, most of whom have a development in their districts, tend to support greater upkeep and security rather than calling for public housing destruction as was common in other cities; (6) most housing developments in New York have better access to mass transit, and therefore to employment, than those in other U.S. cities; and (7) apartment living is the norm in New York City so residence in high-rise public housing may carry less of a stigma than in a predominantly low-rise city. Acknowledging contextual influences does not, however, explain away the dramatic differences in public housing outcomes between New York and other cities.
Contextual factors, for instance, have not and do not today render New York public housing environments free from poverty, crime, and social disorder. While perhaps less stigmatized than other cities, most New Yorkers can distinguish between “projects” and other apartment buildings. Vandalism is common; many residents throw trash from windows daily and break front door locks; visitors or residents frequently urinate in elevators—and have done so for decades. These developments house a disproportionate percentage of the city’s poorest residents, including many single-parent families, and many developments continue to experience above-average rates of crime (albeit in a city where crime on average is very low). Compared to Chicago, NYCHA as a whole has had lower youth density, but there have been and are today a number of developments with high youth densities and accompanying issues. Woodrow Wilson Houses (1961), for instance, has many large apartments, and in 1966 hit a high of 63.5 percent minors: a figure on par with troubled developments in other cities. In 2013, Wilson Houses still housed a disproportionate percentage of youth: 42 percent of the population was under 21 (528 out of 1,260 registered residents). This high youth population creates extra security and vandalism issues, but the development is still decent and maintained over half a century after it opened.5
Nor has the New York location always been an asset. NYCHA developments, while found in every borough (Figure 4.2), are mostly concentrated in some of the city’s poorest, low-income neighborhoods such as Brownsville, Bushwick, the South Bronx, and East Harlem. Gentrification may be advancing today in some of these districts, but for many decades these neighborhoods experienced major social disorder as a result of deindustrialization, white flight, and disinvestment. They remain mostly troubled neighborhoods today with lower incomes, largely mediocre school performance, and higher crime than the rest of the city. Tens of thousands of formerly homeless residents, whom managers believe are often more disruptive and typically have less income for rent, were also given priority for NYCHA apartments in the 1980s (and are again receiving priority in 2014). The New York context matters, but it is obviously not determinative nor an entirely positive influence.
This article focuses on two key elements in the management of high-rise public housing towers: daily maintenance and resident selection. These are not the only elements in the NYCHA story (see Public Housing That Worked: New York in the Twentieth Century and Fritz Umbach’s Myth #9 detailing the important role of housing police in maintaining order), but it is certainly the case, as was demonstrated negatively in other cities, that maintenance and tenant management are critical elements in high-rise public housing survival. Despite episodes of administrative bungling, aging infrastructure, declining federal support, and a vast amount of critical press over its more than seventy-five-year history, NYCHA has developed a custodial system at developments that still works. If anything, NYCHA’s biggest challenge today is that it has maintained its developments so much better than other cities that the system now demands massive capital, now in short supply, for renovating building systems that have reached the end of their projected lifespan.
Figure 4.2 Astoria Houses (1951, 1,102 units, 3,135 people) includes a mix of six- and seven-story buildings on the Queens waterfront. Astoria Houses is one of NYCHA’s typical, large, elevator apartment complexes of the type often found outside Manhattan and Brooklyn. It was still fully occupied in 2014. Photograph by author.
The research for this chapter is derived from historical documents, recent reports, news coverage, and on-site visits I made to a variety of NYCHA housing developments. My visits included extensive interviews with managers, supervisors, and other employees who, because of my reputation as a fair observer, were frank and open about the challenges they face in managing these large developments. We also walked the grounds, visiting randomly selected buildings, rode elevators, walked down stair halls, and chatted with caretakers as we went. I have also visited many of these developments unaccompanied and discussed conditions extensively with two prominent NYCHA resident leaders, Carol Wilkins and Ethel Velez. The following developments were visited in March 2013: Bushwick Houses, Van Dyke Houses, Brownsville Houses, Whitman Houses, Ingersoll Houses, Kingsborough Houses, Johnson Houses, Woodrow Wilson Houses, and Ravenswood Houses. These developments are mostly in the major concentrations of public housing in New York (Harlem and East New York) and are typical in terms of size and height. Together, these nine developments officially house nearly twenty-six thousand New Yorkers, but the actual number of residents is likely much higher than that.
Custodial Labor History
What separates New York from many other cities is that administrators have viewed their system as apartment buildings where poor people happen to live, not as “poor people apartments.” What is remarkable is that this attitude persists nearly eight decades later in NYCHA developments. Early on, NYCHA set specific staffing numbers and has largely maintained them today, at levels commensurate with or exceeding those found in middle-class buildings. Administrators, for instance, placed thirty-six permanent staff members in the Kingsborough Houses in 1941 to manage 1,100 units.6 During the postwar era that birthed most of NYCHA’s large developments (1945–1965) this heavily staffed system expanded in tandem. In 1952, for instance, officials reported that they maintained a systemwide ratio of staff to residents of one employee per twenty families (approximately eighty residents). The distribution on site was described in more detail in 1957: “Our basic method of staffing is one housing caretaker (porter) for each high-rise building (14 stories or over) . . . and one housing caretaker for three 6 story buildings.” While the details have changed over the decades, the general notion of assigning large numbers of workers directly on developments remains. Table 4.1 shows staffing levels at the developments I visited in March 2013.7
The next step was to professionalize the force of workers and managers. Civil service requirements for NYCHA employees, initiated in the 1930s, have played a major role in reducing patronage that corrupted staffs in many other cities. By 1941, 84 percent of NYCHA’s 719 employees had been selected through civil service exams, and this requirement persists today for all staff above caretakers, including maintenance workers, supervisors, housing assistants, and all managers. Caretakers are not required to pass civil service exams, but most eventually do so that they can move to a higher level in the organization. Civil service requirements cannot prevent all patronage, but they certainly make patronage more difficult.8
The final step was to create a logical and regular division of labor. Abundant staff on site, of course, did not guarantee anything; there are examples of housing authorities (Chicago’s, for example) with large staffs that failed to maintain developments at all. But staff always had regular routines at NYCHA: the porter/caretaker, on a daily basis, swept all the stairways and mopped the elevators; weekly, he or she mopped the stairwells. Many of the superintendents and managers in the early developments also brought methods of management from the military. One longtime employee remembered one manager in particular who “would line up all the caretakers in the morning. . . . And he would march them down the development and they would drop off at their buildings.”9
The challenges of maintenance for this staff were often as serious in New York as in other cities. Fort Greene Houses (1944, 3,501 units, and now referred to as Whitman-Ingersoll), for instance, has endured despite experiencing social and vandalism issues for over half a century. In contrast to the high-quality developments of the 1930s, such as Williamsburg and Harlem River Houses, which boasted high-quality materials and excellent masonry work, cost cutting and wartime exigencies during the construction of Fort Greene necessitated the use of lower quality materials and labor. These economies made maintenance more difficult; behavioral issues quickly compounded the construction problems. In 1945, for instance, residents faced unsanitary conditions “created by the children’s misuse of the elevators and public halls, showing an absence of parental guidance and supervision.”10 Social problems continued after the war. By 1957, Fort Greene had “two gangs of men assigned solely to the task of replacing glass” because “one of the forms of amusement for the children in the area seems to be throwing stones at these large panes of glass.” Fort Greene by this time not only had broken glass, but also cracking walls, broken light fixtures, and unhinged doors. NYCHA administrators, rather than allow for continued decline, decided to renovate the complex in 1957 including replacing all of the plumbing, repaving the paths, substituting wood doors with stainless steel, renovating benches, and replacing broken glass.11 This early intervention, followed up by additional renovation in the years to come, indicates how even the weakest of NYCHA’s developments received extra attention.
Fort Greene may have been one of the more troubled developments of the era, but in the 1950s NYCHA initiated a decades-long battle to maintain even its best-constructed developments. Reformers brought in to lead NYCHA in the late 1950s, to curtail Robert Moses’s hold on the authority, found that “the program as a whole consists of well built, well maintained, well managed modern structures,”12 but they also identified worrisome trends. In 1957, for instance, one external review found that 20 percent of housing developments were “suffering from ‘heavy vandalism and serious disorder’ ” and another 29.5 percent were “experiencing ‘constant vandalism of a petty nature.’ ”13 New York public housing was not a paradise, even if the comparatively upwardly mobile population of the time (Sonia Sotomayor, Joel Klein, and others) went on to high-profile careers after living in the developments.
In order to respond to these problems, administrators in the 1950s and 1960s changed design standards. New buildings featured more glazed brick or block rather than painted interior halls. The long-term value of these glazed surfaces is evident even today at high-rise developments such as Bushwick Houses (1960) where the glazed block entries and apartment corridors can be cleaned to a higher level than the painted surfaces at a development such as Fort Greene. Elevator speeds in developments under construction in the 1950s and 1960s also increased in order to reduce the amount of time that children would spend waiting for elevators; long wait times equaled greater opportunities for vandalism, as seen in cities such as Chicago. The fast elevators at the thirty-story Polo Grounds (1968), for instance, are testament to this change of direction. Each of the four towers has six elevators, which are evenly divided between the first and sixteenth floors and the seventeenth and thirtieth floors, and are as good or better than anything comparable in the private-sector housing market.
Historian Samuel Zipp also makes a convincing case that redesign of apartments in the 1950s and 1960s in new developments allowed for greater family privacy and played an important role in keeping NYCHA apartments competitive in the New York market.14 Apartment interiors now had “bright color, practical tile floors, modern kitchens and separate dinettes, larger windows, and the simple amenities of closet doors, showers, and toilet covers.” Some of these basic elements, such as closet doors, had been left out for economic reasons in early developments such as Queensbridge Houses (1940) in order to boost the number of units per development.15 The many large apartments at Woodrow Wilson Houses (1961) in East Harlem, for instance, were larger than the units in early developments and included eat-in-kitchens, a rarity in New York City as a whole. Apartment upgrades, both to new and many older developments, yielded positive long-term effects. In a 1966 study, 70 percent of the residents in Claremont Village (1962), for instance, rated their apartments highly. Almost 80 percent believed that their new public housing development was better than the neighborhood where they lived before.16
Apartment standards may have improved by the 1960s, but the demands on NYCHA staff grew greater every decade, even as the authority updated its methods and materials. At Johnson Houses (1948) a longtime manager recalled in an oral history interview that in the 1960s “the field staff was excellent. The caretakers who are sort of the forgotten soldiers of this fight . . . would go from week to week. They start out on a Monday and start cleaning up the place, straightening out the place, and by Thursday or Friday, the development looks good and really nice. Then of course we got bombed on the weekends, even though we had a crew coming in, but a limited number, on Saturday and Sunday. . . . So that [on] Monday morning the work had to begin again almost from scratch.”17 All that effort may have been frustrating for workers, but it saved the buildings. Johnson Houses in 2013, for instance, remains a well-maintained development with twenty-one caretakers and thirty-six total staff. The hallways are bright (no broken corridor windows), the floors clean, elevators relatively new, and the roof, parapet, and top-floor apartments of all the fourteen-story buildings were recently renovated. The development also received high marks on its HUD PHAS review, which includes random, detailed apartment and building inspections—an achievement that is difficult to attain in such a large and complex system. What is even more remarkable is that this development is situated in the middle of an interproject gang war that has led to many shootings, and some murders, over the past few years.
One of the developments singled out in the 1960s as unsatisfactory because of vandalism and crime, Van Dyke Houses (1955) in Brownsville is representative of the lengths the housing authority has taken to keep some its most troubled developments habitable. Van Dyke Houses is composed of 1,603 units in twenty-two buildings (13 fourteen-story towers and 9 three-story low-rise structures) on 22.35 acres for approximately four thousand residents. Van Dyke was, in fact, one of the prime examples of high-rise design errors featured by Oscar Newman in his book Defensible Space (1972). Newman faulted Van Dyke for its height, the orientation of its entrances away from the street, and long, double-loaded interior hallways that created a more anonymous condition. Newman acknowledged that NYCHA staff performed better daily maintenance than other housing authorities, and even his photographs of NYCHA projects illustrating design flaws were notably tidy, but he was right that serious crime and other problems, some of them related to design, could very well have rendered the development uninhabitable in the same manner as Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. A highly troubled neighborhood and thousands of other public housing apartments in tower blocks also surrounded, and threatened the peace, of the development.
The managers at NYCHA at first committed supplemental funds to Van Dyke on a temporary basis, but this did not seem to be enough: “janitorial standards have deteriorated since removal of [the] supplementary task force program which ended November 30, 1970. Buildings suffer from abnormally high tenant abuse, no tenant cooperation. Janitorial timecards reflect a high absenteeism rate.” Even “the use of a carpenter full-time does not keep pace with the damaged doors and hardware.” Hundreds of windows were being broken every month and residents frequently flooded the halls by turning on the standpipes. Residents, for their part, claimed that “simple services such as hot water, heat, decent lighting in halls . . . seem very hard to come by.”18 The authority responded to the continuing issues by adding permanent staff to Van Dyke in the early 1970s. NYCHA hired nineteen additional caretakers and one additional foreman of caretakers. According to the authority, “The added staff is concentrating on washing and waxing of the buildings . . . and cleaning up the grounds. In addition a painter has been assigned full time” and “two glaziers have been added to the staff to handle the heavy replacement of glass lights [panes].” The authority also hired a full-time elevator mechanic and helper in the Brownsville developments and extra teams of repair workers. In 1975, Van Dyke finally received a satisfactory mark, as “the alarming trend towards an irreversible decline has been halted.”19 This turnaround happened at the very time that many high-rise public housing developments around the country reached their nadir.
More than three decades later, and despite ongoing crime, littering, and tenant vandalism, Van Dyke is still providing housing for 4,330 residents. The development has forty-two full-time workers (of fifty budgeted), including five maintenance workers, four housing assistants, and twenty-four caretakers. Each caretaker looks after one high-rise or three low-rises. As at other NYCHA developments, caretakers “police” the grounds every day, sweeping all hallways, cleaning out trash, and emptying compactors; on a weekly basis, they mop floors and stair halls top to bottom. A brick-repointing project was recently launched, and elevators in the high-rises are relatively new. Six full-time maintenance workers address thirty to fifty work tickets a day and manage to keep up with requests filed with the Central Call Center (CCC), although there is a backlog in skilled trade requests such as plastering. The high-rises I visited were passably clean with limited graffiti, had working (if clearly hard used) elevators, and litter-free halls. The vast open spaces at Van Dyke are less impressive than other developments that have had renovations. The longtime manager admitted that the high-rises were not easy to manage, but he also reported that in his experience Van Dyke, and nearby Brownsville Houses, are now significantly safer than in the 1980s and 1990s.
Many troubled developments like Van Dyke were targeted in the 1970s for extra janitorial service, and, according to NYCHA administrators in that era, there were “dramatic improvements in the appearance of building quarters, floors, and lobbies due to the use of improved materials, better techniques, and modern equipment as well as the utilization of plain old elbow grease.”20 It was not simply a matter of regular clearing either, but frequently expensive repairs. In 1972 alone, for instance, NYCHA reported that systemwide “more than 188,000 panes” of glass were replaced at a cost of more than $1.2 million. On an annual basis, the authority was spending $3 million just to remove graffiti.21 In order to reduce future vandalism costs, the authority installed “vandal resistant fixtures” systemwide. Management also began “using more Plexiglas as well and tempered glass and steel in high breakage areas,” and simply reduced the amount of glass in entrances, lobbies, and stairwells. These new materials improved durability, but they also gave developments a more institutional ambiance that created a greater distinction between public housing environments and privately managed housing.22
This adaptation process has been a constant at NYCHA in its race to maintain the standard of living on development grounds. The transformation of landscapes, for instance, provides a concise case study of these changes. Limited budgets, anti-social behavior on the grounds, and the authority’s focus on building interiors during the 1960s and 1970s eventually took a toll on once verdant lawns and plantings. Managers paved over many grassy areas and ripped out many older plantings. Steel benches and sodium vapor lighting gave the grounds of many developments a more institutional appearance. Mature trees survived, but many of the development grounds began to look more like large parking areas than the green spaces they were supposed to be. On the positive side, and different from the situation in many cities where administrators failed to provide adequate recreational facilities, growing youth populations motivated administrators in the 1950s to change many green lawns to a mix of passive and active recreation zones that included playgrounds, spray fountains, and basketball courts.
Since the mid-1990s, and in contrast to so many other cities, the landscapes of nearly all NYCHA developments have been renovated with an eye toward decreasing the likelihood of vandalism and increasing the usefulness of the space through design changes. Grassy areas have been rehabbed in many cases, benches added or restored in configurations designed to maximize sociability and casual surveillance of entrances, additional basketball courts and jungle gyms constructed, and attractive steel fencing has replaced flimsy chain link along nicely paved walkways. Many NYCHA developments also have community garden plots that are popular with residents. Much of the landscape redesign developed in consultation with resident from the developments. Some of these renovated landscapes are, however, already starting to show signs of wear as budget cuts, vandalism, and heavy use take their toll. Most community centers have also been renovated over the past two decades, and many new centers built since the 1990s, some designed by leading architects, bring color and life to development grounds.23 Johnson Houses’ new community center, for instance, dramatically transformed one entire area of the development with an indoor basketball court, a child care center, and other community amenities.
NYCHA has also devoted enormous resources to elevator maintenance and renovation since the 1970s. Without functioning elevators, high-rise systems cannot function at all. Many cities proved unable to keep their elevators in serviceable condition even in the early years of development life. Chicago in the early 1980s had one-third of its elevators out on a daily basis. By the 1970s, by contrast, NYCHA employed 350 mechanics solely devoted to the maintenance of the approximately three thousand elevators in the developments. Their work had become so essential to maintaining the system that a labor action in 1973, which pulled repairmen from the front lines, led within a few days to at least twelve thousand residents without elevator service: four hundred of the three thousand elevators had already stalled out.24 By 1988, NYCHA’s elevator staff had grown to 390 full-time repairmen.
NYCHA elevators still experience considerable wear and tear, some of it in the normal course of events (over a billion rides per year by hundreds of thousands of residents), but a significant amount number of outages are the result of vandalism. For instance, teenagers “surfed” the tops of elevators for fun in the 1970s; even today, elevators are frequently vandalized or mistreated out of either antisocial attitudes or frustration at slow speeds. Over two-thirds of all elevators have been replaced in the last decade, and remote sensing of elevators now enables more efficient monitoring of their condition. A major push by the authority to add elevator repair personnel and upgrade elevator service, after embarrassing revelations about repair service in 2009, has apparently met with operational success (Table 4.2). As of 2013, the authority employed a staff of 459 elevator repairmen for its 3,324 elevators (and this division is budgeted for 524 employees), a ratio better than most privately run buildings in the city and a significant boost from just a few years ago. On my visits over the years to NYCHA developments I have frequently occasioned on elevator repairmen in some phase of their work. The amount of funding poured into elevators may, however, be undermining other areas of maintenance.25
Table 4.2 Reported service quality, NYCHA
Source: Selected NYCHA operations data from the Mayor’s Office of Operations (2012). CPR: Agency Performing Reports. City of New York.
*Critical indicator “NA” – means not available in this report
Table 4.3 NYCHA development maintenance routines
Note: NYCHA daily, weekly, and long-term caretaking tasks citywide at most developments.
My impression on visits, both formal and informal over the years, is that the authority still maintains a hierarchical organization with clearly defined responsibilities. This system is partly responsible for the higher standards maintained as compared to public housing in other cities. The large number of employees in one job title, that of caretaker, is particularly crucial to NYCHA’s survival. Their daily tasks are described in Table 4.3, and nearly every manager I spoke with stressed the crucial importance of daily custodial functions in maintaining the livability of NYCHA developments, no matter the location. Significant daily vandalism and littering could, within just a few days, make development grounds entirely unlivable.
Many of the NYCHA caretakers are recruited from resident seasonal workers on NYCHA grounds. The authority has an incentive to upgrade the income of its residents (it can raise their rents) and the caretaker role is relatively well paid (starting at $26,000) and unionized. It is also a physically taxing and frustrating job because of the hard treatment meted out by residents and visitors in many buildings. Approximately 38 percent of NYCHA employees, many of them caretakers, still live in NYCHA apartments. There is no civil service requirement for caretaker (nor is a high school diploma required); caretakers mostly learn on the job, yet they are encouraged and subsidized by the union to gain skills that will lead them to higher-level jobs. I met many supervisors and managers on my visits who began as seasonal help or caretakers but worked their way up within NYCHA ranks. In essence, the system not only maintains the buildings but also functions as a successful antipoverty program. Other cities are just experimenting with this system today, but NYCHA has maintained it for decades with relative success. Managers believe that having residents as employees enhances the connection between residents and NYCHA. Some managers did note anecdotally that they tend to have additional problems in work habits, competency, and technical ability with some employees recruited from resident populations.
NYCHA better maintained its public housing than other cities, but the longevity of this housing presents its own challenges as buildings age, rent returns stagnate, and operating subsidies decrease. Criticism has been growing from many residents who, accustomed to higher levels of service in the past, experience delays in apartment repairs including walls, ceilings, bathrooms, kitchens, and windows. In 2005, for instance, the percentage of apartments with one or more observable maintenance defect was just 3.2 percent according to an independent city analysis. This was a remarkable accomplishment in light of the age of the buildings and various social issues system wide. In 2008, however, that figure had jumped to 8.5 percent. Between 2008 and 2011, conditions declined further. In 2008, for instance, only 5.5 percent of NYCHA units had 5 or more deficiencies (a very serious situation), but by 2011 that same figure had risen to 8.8 percent of units.26 The number of units with three or more deficiencies in 2011 was 34.8 percent, a rate 10 percent higher than other rent regulated rentals citywide. Even taking into account differences in sampling methods and standards over time, a decline in maintenance is evident since 2000; a change confirmed by many resident leaders, community activists, and federal reviews.27
Declining standards are the result of a number of factors, beyond the aging infrastructure of the system as a whole. Above all, NYCHA experienced reductions in maintenance and other skilled trade staff as a result of federal and city budget cuts since 2001. NYCHA employs a total of 670 skilled maintenance workers systemwide in 2013, yet, if actually fully funded by HUD, would have 800 maintenance workers on development grounds (this figure does not include other skilled trades and contract private-sector staff who complete more comprehensive repairs). As some employees told me, sometimes you can “do more with less,” but sometimes “less is less.” Despite workers clearing approximately two million systemwide repair work orders per year, a backlog of 333,000 nonemergency repair calls had developed by early 2013, with some residents given work tickets for repairs years in the offing because of skilled trade shortages. Managers, understandably, focused remaining human resources on emergency calls. Repair teams in FY2012 may have taken, on average, thirty days to resolve a nonemergency request, often involving a skilled trade for work such as plastering or painting, but only 7.5 hours to resolve an emergency service request.28
Organizational issues likely compounded the staff cutbacks. A centralized call center system, borrowed from the private-sector model, seems to have added confusion and created delays in fulfilling repairs. In this system, tenant calls are evaluated based upon seriousness and sent to either development-based maintenance workers or floating “skilled trades” teams rather than addressed directly by development-based staff as was usual in the past. Some workers believed that rather than smoothing the process of making repairs, the call center added errors and redundant visits. Declining labor relations between NYCHA management and its unionized staff, because of cutbacks in overtime and staffing levels, may also have contributed to the backlog.
With growing public awareness of these problems, and a boost in funding from city officials, administrators have introduced major initiatives to improve conditions. NYCHA has reorganized procurement and repair protocols and initiated a task force to deal with the backlog of orders generated by the declining buildings and call center activity. Skilled trades, in an innovative program expanded in 2011–2012, now complete thousands of repairs, including all outstanding work tickets, in a single development in a matter of weeks. Maintenance staff are also being added or at least rehired; and it appears that a certain amount of repairmen/contractors were hired outside union rules in order to expedite repairs.29 By December of 2013, NYCHA had reduced the apartment backlog to just 48,000 through expedited repairs, extra staff, flexible hours, and more efficient follow-up. Fall 2013 PHAS reviews by HUD independent reviewers, showing a 20 percent improvement in apartment scores, confirmed this progress. NYCHA has also created a comprehensive website, NYCHA Metrics, showing recent performance levels in most of the Authority’s operations; the figures provided, not yet verified by an independent study, indicate continued progress in meeting both emergency and non-emergency repair demands in 2014.30
Despite the catch-up in repairs, and a new focus on elevators, major capital issues still need to be addressed in thousands of these aging structures. In fact, the large number of resident maintenance requests is related, in part, to the declining state of major systems such as exterior walls, plumbing, and windows that create multiple, and often recurring, problems inside apartments. Since the 1990s, over $7 billion has been spent on capital renovation, including brick repointing, elevator replacement and overhaul, window replacement, new heating systems, new roofs, and new appliances. The red-brick uniformity of NYCHA design may not be to everyone’s liking aesthetically, but the repetition has enabled relatively cost-effective contracting and renovation of brickwork, roofs, elevators, and windows. Fort Greene Houses, for instance, was coming off a decade-long round of renovation in 2013 when I visited, with total costs of approximately $250 million. Among the many renovations in the apartment houses were newly installed stairs, new floors, new elevators, and complete apartment reconfigurations that finally remedied longstanding quality issues.
Yet ever more aging NYCHA developments need updating as the mass of housing constructed in the postwar era reaches its projected life span. In 2011, for instance, 255 developments were thirty years old or more, and eighty-four developments were between forty to forty-nine years old. Most NYCHA developments were designed with a projected fifty-year life span. Federally financed capital funds (much reduced since the 1990s), new annual subsidies secured for formerly city and state developments (known as federalization), additional city funds, and the recent federal stimulus have addressed only some deferred maintenance. A 2013 study estimated that over a twenty-year period, NYCHA would have to spend $17 billion to renovate its entire apartment stock and building systems. With a steady decline in federal capital and operating subsidies over the past decade, resulting from successful Republican opposition to social programs, other solutions are being sought to renewing NYCHA such as city bond sales, rent increases, staff reductions, and even leasing of open land on NYCHA properties for new developments.31
Residents, and resident leaders, have been widely featured in recent years on the pages of The Daily News, New York Post and The New York Times complaining about various, and growing, problems they have with NYCHA administrators and quality of life. Survey results, however, reveal a more complicated picture of NYCHA existing outside the political realm. An extensive survey by Baruch College in 2010 that questioned one thousand residents in housing developments and six hundred Section 8 voucher holders (in privately run housing) found that voucher holders do have a better view of their buildings, apartments, and neighborhood conditions than project-based public housing residents. But the survey as a whole did not demonstrate the overwhelming superiority of the voucher programs in creating a high-quality urban existence; nor do the results provide a justification for drastic redevelopment of public housing in New York. For instance, “approximately 66 percent of residents in conventional public housing are satisfied with their apartments and their neighborhood compared with 80 percent of voucher holders” and “70 percent of public housing residents rate their apartment positively as a place to live; and more than 80 percent of voucher holders rate their housing unit favorably.” In light of the dramatic difference in typology, conditions, and management between public housing and most Section 8 apartments, this difference is not that striking. The survey also found that most public housing “respondents consider[ed] their apartments to be a good value.” One of the brightest spots in the survey was NYCHA staff: “85% of residents [are] satisfied with how NYCHA staff treats them when performing repairs.” Resident leaders I have spoken with, such as Ethel Velez at Johnson Houses, generally say nice things about their local caretakers, but also believe that they and other NYCHA staff are spread thinner than in the past. Residents so value NYCHA apartments that they, and activists who support them, have beaten back any serious discussion of widespread demolition or redevelopment of the type pursued in other cities.32
These surprisingly positive reviews from critical New Yorkers, rarely published in the press, are clearly the result of the extensive human system in place. Where maintenance staffing levels are high, management strong, and renovation recent, as at Ravenswood, Johnson, or Rangel Houses, the quality of upkeep of everything from entryways to playgrounds is indistinguishable from a well-managed private-sector apartment complex (and probably better than many apartment buildings in poor neighborhoods). Similar efforts are made at socially troubled developments such as Bushwick and Van Dyke Houses, but maintaining a high standard is more challenging as a result of vandalism and deferred maintenance.33 As in any institution, context, funding, and the work ethic are variable, but without the thousands of hard-working employees, the high-rises would have become unlivable decades ago. That New York defies conventional wisdom when it comes to high-rise public housing is indicated by the fact that activists, and most city officials, are actively seeking ways to preserve this housing system rather than demolish it.
Social Management
As the father of public housing, Senator Robert Wagner, so nicely put it in 1937, public housing “after all, is a renting proposition, not a complete gift.”34 New York’s history reveals that liberal policy initiatives sometimes need a conservative hand in practice. Public housing was, in fact, designed to be partly self-supporting and self-managed rather than an institutional environment. Early tenant families were required to be married, employed, and were selected on an unblemished record of decorum. Rents needed to be paid and residents needed to manage the bulk of their own affairs. The design of public housing developments to emphasize private apartment living reflects the notion that the family, rather than institutional controls, was the most important building block of community.35
New York, like other authorities in the 1930s, thus sought to attract and keep working-class residents who would both pay rent and control their children. Early NYCHA administrators in the 1930s were outspoken in their belief that it would be “harmful to the whole movement of housing if we collect such low rents that the taxpayer will be called upon to make further contributions.” They were also worried that favoring low-income residents would “put a premium on sheer lowness of income. It acts as a positive deterrent to all attempts to increase the family income.” Administrators were equally concerned that concentrating and isolating poor families would deprive them of the “beneficial effect of contact with families who are self-supporting.”36 The administrators were prescient, because such an idea is now dominant in affordable housing circles; nevertheless, the Housing Authority was forced in the 1930s by federal officials to accept more welfare residents. NYCHA developed and expanded its city- and state-financed system of public housing, built to higher standards, in part to establish higher income populations in public housing that administrators knew could pay sufficient rents to support maintenance.
More notably, NYCHA in the 1950s put in place a series of behavioral and other standards (known as the Twenty-One Factors) that, for more than a decade, kept welfare tenancy much lower than it was in other cities. These standards included factors such as drug addiction, unwed motherhood, irregular work, and other factors that essentially barred many applicants from gaining access to NYCHA apartments. What distinguished New York from other cities was the length of time that standards like these persisted and were maintained at the entry point of public housing, rather than emphasizing punitive rules on existing residents. Administrators were able to use the market pressure in the New York citywide, which generated many more applicants than units, to maintain this selectivity; most other cities were not so lucky and often struggled to find qualified applicants.
In spite of pressure to focus public housing on the most needy in New York, particularly in the urban renewal era when so many site residents were displaced, NYCHA continued to use traditional moral judgments to select residents, evicted effectively for misconduct and nonpayment, and had near-perfect rent collection up until the late 1960s. These socially conservative standards remained even as the housing authority switched from a primarily white to an entirely minority tenancy of African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and ethnic newcomers in all of its developments.37 Historian D. Bradford Hunt has also identified the higher percentage of smaller apartments created in NYCHA buildings as an important factor in preventing large, multiproblem family from dominating the towers in New York City. NYCHA administrators showed no great concern for the needs of large families, but it is not clear whether this was for behavioral or financial reasons.38
Rapid white flight from NYCHA developments by the late 1950s transformed the system from a white working-class system to a minority dominated working-class system, with a mix of white, Puerto Rican, and African American residents. The fact that the housing authority had initially been successful in integrating public housing developments in the postwar period did not stop the white exodus from public housing. In 1962, whites were still 42.7 percent of the entire tenant population. By 1969, however, the white population was only 27.9 percent of tenant population, the black population stood at 46.2 percent, and the Puerto Rican population had reached 25.9 percent. This growing minority resident population was at first judged by the same strict standards faced by the whites prior to the late 1960s.39 This was the era when upwardly mobile minority families, such as that of Justice Sonia Sotomayor, found public housing developments to be a temporary but essential refuge in a highly restricted and expensive housing market.
It became too controversial for NYCHA, despite the comparative social order in New York’s public housing, to maintain these policies in the late 1960s. Welfare activists and politicians forced NYCHA to change its tenant selection policies in 1968. Welfare residents in public housing in New York went from 11.7 percent citywide in 196240 to 34 percent in 1973. In 1972 alone, NYCHA made 50 percent of its open rentals to welfare families. New residents dramatically increased the welfare percentages, but even some old residents could be counted in the growing welfare population at NYCHA as expanding benefits dovetailed citywide with deindustrialization and recession.41
Even though the rate of welfare recipients in New York public housing was roughly half the rate of Chicago at this time (welfare rates there skyrocketed in the 1970s to above 70 percent of all tenant families),42 some individual NYCHA developments suffered from rates of welfare concentration above 40 percent. Social issues mounted in developments; drug trafficking, robbery, and violent crime became widespread. Remaining white residents, and many minority families, moved out of developments, including many city-funded ones, for private housing in the city or the suburbs. During this time, the housing authority added only a few new units as it attempted to maintain control over its existing and increasingly troubled communities. Complicating matters further, tens of thousands of homeless persons gained NYCHA apartments in the 1980s, a key element in the reduction of homelessness on New York’s streets, but one that added to the fiscal challenges by adding many residents with very low incomes or prospects of higher income which could be used toward rents. NYCHA became more and more dependent on federal subsidies to make up for the difference between the actual costs of upkeep and the maximum amount that residents could pay. Even today, rents cover less than half the cost of operating a typical NYCHA unit.
As the reality set in that the changes in tenant standards had dangerously shifted finances and behavior among residents, NYCHA administrators in the 1970s raised income limits, turned a blind eye to higher income residents generally, and created the Tier System. The Tier system gave higher income residents priority for open apartments in many developments as a way to restrain poverty concentration. In the 1990s, because of a continuing but slow uptick in welfare concentration both in the system as a whole and in certain developments, administrators created the Working Family preference that gave one of two open apartments to a working family. Eviction processes were also reinstated that did not ultimately force many people out, but sent a strong message that nonpayment of rent and antisocial behavior would meet a strong institutional response. Rent collection has often been a matter of going door-to-door to collect late payments, and annual apartment inspections remain a management tool today.43
Through these means, welfare reform (that ended benefits), and a tight housing market, NYCHA maintained and even rebuilt working family tenancy. Average family income at NYCHA as of 2013 is $23,000; eighty-eight thousand total NYCHA residents hold jobs, with the largest numbers in health care and social assistance (31 percent). This reality (Table 4.4) contrasts strongly with the persistently high rates of welfare tenancy in public housing in a city such as Chicago; a factor that contributed to both financial problems and aggressive redevelopment schemes under HOPE VI.44 NYCHA has in recent years raised rents on its higher income residents in order to help close deficits created by declining federal subsidies, and it is set to raise them more in the coming years, thus staving off more draconian service cuts that even larger deficits would have created.
The fact that NYCHA residents have some income should not lead one to mistake the system as barring poor residents. Not only are about 11 percent of tenant families receiving public assistance, and many receive the new welfare (Social Security Disability), but also the average family income of $23,000 is well below the adjusted (for cost of living) New York City poverty line of $26,138 for a family of four. Fully 60 percent of households earn less than 30 percent of the Area Median Income. Single parents, many subsisting on retirement benefits, also head the majority of families with children in NYCHA buildings. This complex demographic reality (Figure 4.3) likely reflects the high divorce and low marriage rates in minority communities in New York City.45
The social challenges at NYCHA developments with low-income families demand a strong management hand. The housing assistants (usually two to four per development) at each NYCHA development have, as one of their jobs, the thankless task of trying to collect rent arrears. As indicated by the chart below (Table 4.5), delinquent rent levels are now relatively high at many NYCHA developments and reflect both chronic nonpayment and the impact of the recent recession on working families of color. My findings on the ground correspond with newly released citywide rent delinquency figures for NYCHA that show a citywide average hovering, month to month, around and sometimes below 80 percent. Managers explained to me that the increasing rate of rent delinquency correlated strongly with the recent recession as many working families lost employment.46 NYCHA employees also reported to me that rent is not a priority for a many families; they will pay other bills, such as cable or cell phones, before paying their rent.
Table 4.4 Reported NYCHA statistics
Source: Selected NYCHA data from Mayor’s Office of Operations (2012). CPR: Agency Performing Reports. City of New York.
*Critical indicator “NA” — means not available in this report
Figure 4.3 NYCHA family structure citywide as reported by the New York City Housing Authority (2012).
Source: New York City Housing Authority.
Housing Assistants, as they have for eight decades, still chase late rents. When even one rental payment is missed, housing assistants will immediately visit apartments, make calls, and schedule appointments to try and collect rent. If there is a second missed payment, NYCHA begins legal action. It is well known that NYCHA is a major and constant presence in the housing courts in New York City because of the size and complexity of the caseload. Housing assistants may spend up to two days per week in court and now have regular scheduled days in various housing courts. At Ravenswood Houses, for instance, there might be ten to twenty cases heard per week in court. As indicated in the chart above, however, the actual physical evictions (dispossession of apartment) in public housing are low, and are far exceeded by regular move outs (including transfers) in all the developments I visited. An unknown number of the move outs, however, may be resident families, behind on their rents, moving before the shame of formal dispossession.
Source: Selected data from NYCHA developments visited in 2013 as part of the author’s research.
Legal proceedings are used to keep pressure on residents, but many NYCHA residents are aware that the courts are reluctant to evict residents. Residents may also see in their developments many others who have avoided payment for long periods with little visible penalty. Residents will try to use maintenance issues, which are more common today than in the past, as an excuse to not pay their rents (even if they have missed their repair appointments or vandalized their own apartments). Many managers explained that while there is often a change in who does not pay, there are chronic nonpayers who have learned to work the system. The legal dance between NYCHA and particular residents may go on for years. Some NYCHA managers focus on repairs for these residents, create a long-term plan for repayment of back rent, and charity or public assistance may also make up for some back rents, but in the end managers must write off a percentage of delinquent rents every year. NYCHA housing assistants must also contend with fraud, including illegal subletting, unreported income, working out of state, or even residents owning homes elsewhere. Computerization has helped the tracking of these cases and there have been recent fraud prosecutions, but it is well known that “off the books” income is common in public housing both in New York and in other cities.
The entire system, everything from knocking on doors to dispossession, seems to exist to keep pressure on the vast majority of residents who do pay regularly; the system can be considered reasonably successful given the difficult and often complex economic and social issues of many residents. Threat of legal action is real and time consuming for those barely getting by, and it is clearly avoided by approximately 80 percent of the resident population. Most NYCHA residents are neither victims nor villains, just lower-income New Yorkers who pay a rent they can afford.
Conclusion
NYCHA’s history proves without a doubt that public housing form matters a great deal less than most people believe. NYCHA, for instance, has maintained everything from two- to thirty-one story towers, mostly in vast superblocks. NYCHA managers acknowledge that high-rises are more challenging (heavy use of equipment, expensive renovations, and greater anonymity), but they were also unanimous that such developments, with the right combination of elbow grease, tenancy, and financing, can be well maintained for a majority poor population. These findings indicate that blaming a specific typology of public housing for management and tenant failure (high-rise superblocks), as has been done in many other cities, makes little sense. Moreover, many cities with notoriously bad public housing—such as pre-Katrina New Orleans—have mismanaged a portfolio of developments, at great cost to the federal government, that were overwhelmingly low-rise.
Sound housing management, much like one finds in market buildings, has simply been applied to the greatest degree possible in New York to high-rise public housing communities full of poor or working-class people. The comparative success of NYCHA in maintaining its system has meant that planned redevelopment includes renovation of existing buildings (with the residents remaining in place) and additional market/affordable rate structures on development grounds, rather than the demolition and replacement of existing public housing as has been taking place so extensively in other cities.
To say that NYCHA has proved a point is not to claim that the system was ideal in conception, that the NYCHA system today is perfect in practice (there are significant quantitative and qualitative differences across the many developments), or that within a few years NYCHA will be the same as it is today. If the city government, for instance, does not step in to fill declining federal support, it is likely that the entire management system will collapse. Nor is it the point of this article or the Public Housing That Worked book to debate the wisdom of putting low-income residents in high-rise public housing. The constant raining down of trash from high windows, often underutilized open spaces, and elevator vandalism has demanded extra costs and superhuman maintenance that might have been better utilized elsewhere or mitigated with better design. At the same time, providing decent housing for hundreds of thousands of poor people for decades in America’s most expensive city is no small achievement.