Elected officials, labor leaders and others got a first-hand look at life in the city’s public housing in East and West Harlem last week when they toured the New York City Housing Authority’s Drew Hamilton Housing and Wagner Houses, courtesy of Community Voices Heard (CVH), a housing advocacy group.
City Councilmembers Rosie Mendez (D-Manhattan) and Melissa Mark Viverito (D-Manhattan), District Council 37 Executive Director Lilian Roberts and Teamsters Local 237s Deputy Director of the Housing Division, James Giocastro, were among those on the tour. Assemblymembers Keith Wright, chair of the subcommittee on Public Housing, Adam Clayton Powell, and Herman “Denny” Farrell sent representatives.
This was not one of those trendy jaunts designed to titillate tourists so common in Harlem nowadays. This tour showed another side of a community where brownstones are going for over $2 million. Visitors saw the plastic cover over a gaping hole in Sarah Rodriguez’s bathroom and the hole where a stove should be in Errol Miller’s apartment in Drew Hamilton Houses.
Public housing resident Anne Washington, a 53-year-old grandmother, says she moved into New York City Housing Authority’s (NYCHA) Grant Houses 29 years ago with her five children, because it was what she could afford on her salary as a clerical-administrative worker at the Federal Reserve Bank. Then, she says, her apartment was nice, the building was clean and the grounds were well kept. Things have changed. The buildings and grounds are in disrepair. The two elevators in her 21-floor building break down too often and every five months, there’s a leak in her bathroom that makes the paint peel and the plaster buckle and fall.
“The painter told me there is some sort of leak, but NYCHA keeps repainting while failing to address the structural problem. Now there’s leaking in my kitchen and living room,” Washington added.
Now, NYCHA plans to close a $225 million budget deficit by slashing service and staffing. Since 2003, 1,600 administrative and service workers have been cut, and as of October 1, there are plans to fire 500 more.
DC 37’s Lilian Roberts says the conditions she saw during the tour were “a disgrace.” She notes that NYCHA, which manages 344 housing units with 181,000 apartments for more than 500,000 people, houses 15,000 of her 140,000 members.
“If NYCHS is cutting 500 workers, that’s going to be across the board and could include some DC 37 members,” Roberts added.
Roberts observes, “Public housing is essential” in a city where housing costs, even in traditionally working-class communities like Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Fort Greene, are going through the roof. Housing, she says, is an important issue for labor unions, pointing out that DC 37 is both fighting to have residency restrictions lifted so DC 37 members can find more affordable housing outside the city if they must and working to help union members become homebuyers.
Community Voices Heard (CVH), Roberts and other advocates insist the city and state need to contribute more to public housing. Roberts says she hopes Governor Spitzer helps NYCHA by signing the Shelter Allowance Bill that would put $90 million toward helping to alleviate NYCHA’s budget deficit.
Alexa Kasdan, CVH spokesperson, says, “Last fall, during his campaign for governor, then-candidate Eliot Spitzer promised to address New York State’s decade-long failure to fund public housing. While Governor Spitzer has yet to follow through on this promise, he now has the opportunity to do so by signing the shelter allowance bill.”
The bill, which recently passed both houses of the New York State Legislature, would allow the New York City Housing Authority to receive the same rental subsidy for residents who are on public assistance as private landlords do. That would add $90 million in additional revenue annually. If Spitzer fails to sign the bill into law, Kasdan insists, thousands of NYCHA residents, who make up over five percent of New York City’s population, can expect further cuts in services.
