Today’s Headlines

  • New York City Motorists Killed 3 People Walking Yesterday (News)
  • Rep. Earl Blumenauer, RPA’s Tom Wright Bullish on de Blasio Streetcar (NY1)
  • MTA Won’t Say When It Will Restore Bus Stop Linking M86 to Second Ave. Line (DNA)
  • Parking Enforcement Is Down in Queens Neighborhoods and That’s Good News, Says DNA
  • SI Driver Who Fatally Flung Man From Hood of Car Gets 1 to 3 Years (Advance)
  • Crain’s Thinks NYC Should Leave Uber Alone
  • Curb Ramp Wanted to Improve Pedestrian Access to Fort Greene Park (Bklyn Paper)
  • Schumer Detects Pattern in Airplane Crashes, Calls on Feds to Investigate (News)
  • Paterson Mayor Indicted for Corruption (NYT)
  • Thanks Trump (Gothamist; NYT 1, 2, 3; Politico)

More headlines at Streetsblog USA

  • Vooch

    NYCHA should be shutdown. The units should simply be gifted to the existing tenants.

    80 years of failure

  • reasonableexplanation

    Not opposed to that, but what happens then? There are lots of costs involved in running a large apt building, which in condos and coops are handled by maintenance fees. Presumably the folks in NYCHA may not be able to afford these fees… so, who’s going to pay for it?

    I guess the folks living in these houses would need to create their own co-op boards, hire lawyers to handle the paperwork, possibly take out loans against the building for needed repairs… I don’t know what a good solution would be honestly.

  • Vooch

    they do pay rent even if it is modest. Current rent roll should cover maintenance.

    They already have proto Co-op boards.

    The official legal co-op paperwork could be boilerplate created by the city.

  • Reader

    Note that the Daily News headline is “Pedestrian-involved crashes in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens leave three dead, one in critical condition.” Victim blaming!

  • Larry Littlefield

    “Current rent roll should cover maintenance.”

    It doesn’t. In the early 1980s, The Reagan Administration mandated that public housing, concentrated in central cities, should give priority to the disabled, ex offenders, the mentally ill, substance abusers, the homeless, everyone the suburbs wanted to go elsewhere. It was a perfect left-right compromise.

    The rent roll covers maintenance in centrally located projects with lots of workers. In the rest it doesn’t come close, and won’t as long as rents are set at 30 percent of income. Gifting the units to tenants, or private landlords, would just eliminate the ability to blame the city for the rot of the buildings.

  • bolwerk

    Even if that is possible, they’ll still be a blight. The only way to fix it is to reverse some of the damage that was done when they were created.

  • Joe R.

    You could have the tenants doing a lot of the maintenance. Not specialized work like electrical or plumbing, but stuff like painting and exterminating or laying floor/bathroom tile. Think of it as “sweat equity”.

    Homeowners ironically face the same situation. You have a choice of paying other people lots of money for maintenance, or learning to do things yourself and saving tons of money in the process. Nowadays I do pretty much everything. I rewired most of the house years ago, did lots of ceramic tiling, installed air conditioners through the wall, fixed broken pipes, etc. I even would have layed the bricks for the replacement stoop/porch a few years ago but I was a bit short on time.

  • Joe R.

    I wouldn’t call the projects a failure. They worked well enough back when most of the tenants were low-income workers. The funding issues started when they were mandated to let in lots of homeless, drug addicts, ex-cons, mentally ill, and so forth. These people not only paid less rent on average than the working-class people, but they drove out lots of those working class. We should have public housing, but it should be primarily for low-income workers/retirees, and the disabled. The mentally ill and drug addicts should be in facilities designed to deal with their problems, not in public housing. Most ex-cons might be better served in halfway houses until they reintegrate back into society. Sadly, we as a country don’t really wish to fund any of these things, even though it’s probably cheaper in the long run to do so than not.

  • Crazytrainmatt

    I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere yet and got stuck today. The east river greenway is now fenced off and closed around 70th street, which guts the section between 63rd and 71st. The sign says until Mar 31, 2017. The closure requires a long detour on York through all the FDR and hospital traffic.

    This is in addition to the ongoing closure between 78 and 82 to replace the stairs with a ramp, which can be bypassed on east end without too much trouble. The structure of the ramp looks done but it looks 6 months from actual completion.

  • Larry Littlefield

    Fund them? DeBlasio is going to find out if we are even willing to site them.

  • reasonableexplanation

    You could have the tenants do basic maintenance in their own apartments, sure, but for stuff between apartments, as well as infrastructure things, I doubt it. Those are the expensive things, coincidentally.

    Not to mention the liability issues if someone gets hurt from a DIY fix.

    Also, what if they don’t/won’t/can’t do it?

    I’m not seeing this as a realistic solution.

  • Joe R.

    You could give them a discount on the rent for whatever they do. If they can’t, then you do it for them.

    Part of the idea behind having tenants help maintain their building isn’t just to save money. When people invest their labor in something, they tend to take better care of it. As loathe as I am to admit it, a lot of the maintenance in public housing is simply fixing what the tenants destroy. That’s especially true in common areas. Granted, it’s only a small percentage of tenants who do this, but maybe if people invested their labor, those who don’t destroy things might help police the buildings to stop the vandalism.

    Another big issue with maintenance in public housing is accountability. In fact, we have the same problem with street maintenance. In both cases those responsible do an extremely poor job because the system doesn’t hold them accountable. Maybe NYCHA should inspect repair work and withhold payment for any work not up to standards. It’s absolutely ridiculous for example how often elevators are out of service.

  • Vooch

    good point

  • Vooch

    then gift just the good ones

  • ohnonononono

    I mean I guess, if you think economic segregation is a good thing.

  • Vooch

    you willing to pay extra taxes to help NYCHA ?

    Sell some of your stuff and give it to NYCHA .

    maybe pledge $20 a week ?