New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani last month issued a housing plan that calls for building more—what else?—public housing. So it’s heartening to hear even some progressive elected officials demand the city finally address the appalling conditions at its existing housing projects, conditions caused by decades of federal and state underfunding.
New York Attorney General Letitia James, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso and New York City Council member Crystal Hudson on Monday issued a press release condemning a months-long natural gas outage at a New York City Housing Authority (Nycha) complex in Brooklyn.
This “is unacceptable. Without gas service, a simple but essential home-cooked meal becomes much more difficult,” they aver. Tenants “deserve to live in dignity with basic necessities like working stoves and ovens.”
Yes, they do. And the Democratic leaders are right to demand that the city live up to its obligation as the landlord of last resort—a landlord whose buildings have been starved of funds by Washington and Albany for generations. A months-long gas outage is the predictable result of a federal government that treats housing the poor as a cost to be minimized rather than a public good to be maintained. Tenants regularly endure leaky pipes, mold, rodent infestations and furnace breakdowns. Perhaps Mr. Mamdani’s critics consider this “the warmth of the private market.”
Nycha says it needs $78 billion to bring every apartment up to standard. That’s $439,275 per unit, which is the staggering bill that adds up when the city is forced to defer maintenance year after year because Washington won’t pay its fair share and the wealthy fight every tax increase that could fund the repairs.
While Nycha apartments fall deeper into disrepair, Mr. Mamdani last month proposed that the agency finance new housing projects across the city. Just what the city desperately needs.
His plan would require construction workers on these projects to be paid at least $40 an hour in wages and benefits. Such wage requirements are why it cost Nycha $1,973 per apartment to install LED lights, as was reported several years ago—and why the workers who do the repairs can actually afford to live in the city they serve. The backlog of repairs is a monument to disinvestment, not to fair wages.
Mr. Mamdani sensibly proposes in his housing plan an “economic mobility program” to train Nycha tenants to “launch home-based childcare businesses,” which would be subsidized by the city. The program would guide tenants through “health and safety compliance.” Will the years of neglect that left apartments without heat now be remedied so tenants can build the businesses the plan envisions?
Mr. Reynoso and other Democrats running for Congress have made Nycha a campaign issue. Most have called for more federal funding, as they should—Washington covers only two-thirds of Nycha’s operating budget, and the remaining third is a hole the city’s working families are forced to fill. Rep. Adriano Espaillat wants the feds to redirect money from the bloated immigration-enforcement apparatus to Nycha.
Meantime, his Mamdani-backed primary opponent, Darializa Avila Chevalier, has endorsed legislation by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that would spend hundreds of billions of dollars to eliminate CO2 emissions from public housing. New York City’s neglect of its buildings has achieved a perverse version of that: Leave tenants in the cold, and voila, gas emissions drop. The Green New Deal for public housing would actually do it the right way—with investment, not abandonment.
