Cash-strapped and plagued with troubles, the city housing authority (NYCHA) has come up with an interesting plan to raise cash. No, not advertising on public housing. They tried that. Instead they want to incite class warfare lease "unused" playgrounds, parking lots and community centers in the middle of public housing projects so developers can build luxury housing.
Apparently elected officials have been getting briefed on the plan for the past month but regular people are only just starting to catch wind of it. And for the moment it appears that NYCHA, which has tried similar if less lux experiments before, can do this. And so they they are ramping up their awareness campaign and plan to put out a Request For Proposals for the project next month (with public hearings starting as soon as June). At last night's Community Board 3 land use meeting it was explained that NYCHA doesn't have to go before community boards like private developers and businesses when it wants to make changes and/or build new things on public property—they just have to make sure that folks are made aware of the move.
According to documents obtained by the Daily News, NYCHA is initially looking to build 4,330 apartments in eight developments. The lucky developers who get the projects will win 99-year leases with frozen payments for the first 35 years. The only "catch" is that they'll have to set aside 20 percent of their units as "affordable" for families of four that make $50,000 or less. Neighborhoods they are eyeing include the Upper East and West Sides, LES and lower Manhattan.
As you can imagine, this is already not going over well with neighbors and NYCHA tenants. At last night's CB meeting, Lo-Down reports that Smith Houses Tenant President Aixa Torres fumed "This is a travesty. We are not going to take this… When no one wanted to live here, we stayed… if you want a war, you got a war."
But not everyone hates the idea of plopping some luxury housing right in the middle of public housing. Some pragmatists at last night's meeting noted that NYCHA has a massive backlog of repair orders (340,000!) and has no money—and this plan, though taking away amenities, would give it the cash to make the fixes it so desperately needs.
