Under Bloomberg, more enter the shelters but fewer get out. (Jori Bolton)

By the time Anne Pierre and her sons arrived at 199 Amboy Street, it was after midnight. The heat of the unusually warm April day had all but drained away, but there was a mellowness to the air, a contrast to the sharp, cold spring nights that had come before. From the outside, the red-brick building looked clean and well-maintained, though the darkness made it difficult to tell for sure. In Ms. Pierre’s experience, the exteriors of homeless shelters were poor predictors of conditions inside.

Late though it was, the family’s arrival at the Brownsville shelter marked the somewhat triumphant culmination of a bureaucratic odyssey that had started two days earlier, when Ms. Pierre had reapplied for shelter at the family intake center in the Bronx. It was only somewhat triumphant in that 199 Amboy was just a 10-day placement, the latest in a string of temporary housing assignments that had become the norm since the family lost its eligibility for shelter in February. But as it turned out, 199 Amboy was the nicest place Ms. Pierre and the two boys stayed since entering the shelter system in June 2012.

As 9-year-old Jordan described their arrival, “When we saw it, we was shocked. It was nice. It was decent.”

Anne, Jordan and Tyler Pierre.

Decent is the kind of good-enough existence that has seemed to elude the family for the last 10 months. But it felt potentially within reach again when they fell asleep that night at a little after 1 a.m., relieved if still wary, with the alarm set for 6 a.m.—the preparations necessary for the school day ahead as uncompromising as the dawn.

Like many other families who have recently swelled the ranks of the city’s homeless population, routine has taken on an almost talismanic significance for Ms. Pierre and her boys. They live an approximation of a life that involved, until recently, an apartment of their own—a two-bedroom on Legion Street rented for four years with the help of a Section 8 voucher. Ms. Pierre paid $350 of the $1,100 rent until a recurrent mold problem disqualified the apartment.

Routine means showers in the morning and at night (depending on the hot water situation). It means home-style Haitian cooking for dinner, even if that involves dining out—an expensive proposition, but difficult to avoid when you don’t live in any one place long enough to lay in a supply of groceries or retrieve your pots and pans from storage. It means buying cleaning supplies and paper plates and a tablecloth for every new housing placement, no matter how temporary.

It means the boys’ hair is neatly trimmed, their Adidas sneakers unscuffed, their backpacks stiff with relative newness. Ms. Pierre, a compactly built woman who wears patterned acrylic nails and keeps her braids under a neat kerchief, is vigilant about appearances. One morning on the B35 bus to 4-year-old Tyler’s preschool, she noticed that the knees of his red school sweatsuit were slightly soiled. “He’s always on his knees,” she said apologetically. “I just washed these.” When they arrived, she asked about buying a second school sweatsuit, a purchase that would almost certainly make life harder rather than easier, given that they’d been living out of only a few bags and using a nearby laundromat’s wash-and-fold as de facto clothing storage. After 10 months, even their homelessness has taken on aspects of routine. The strange beds, the strange streets, mapping the new bus routes to the boys’ schools in the morning—it is about as familiar as an unfamiliar thing can be.

In January of this year, the city’s homeless population exceeded 50,000—the highest number since the Great Depression. But while previous homeless crises were largely defined by individuals who fell out of the social fabric long before they went homeless—unemployed, unemployable, or with serious health or substance abuse problems—the current crisis is defined by families, who make up some three-quarters of the city’s shelter population.

The number of families in shelters has nearly doubled in the last decade—as of this month, the shelter population included more than 10,000 families and nearly 21,000 children, according to city data. Homeless families have been the fastest-growing segment of the shelter population during Mayor Bloomberg’s reign, soaring from 6,921 when he took office in January 2002 to 11,984 in January 2013, according to data provided by Coalition for the Homeless.

Even as the problem has become more widespread, it has become harder to see. It’s not so much a figure sleeping in a doorway, but a mother lugging around duffel bags, a child’s grades slipping, a family rushing home to make a 10 o’clock shelter curfew.

The current situation may mirror the Great Depression in numbers, but today’s deprivation is played out not against a backdrop of 1930s austerity and thrift, but one of profligacy that revels in extravagances of all sorts, from $20 cocktails to $90 million condos. In Bloomberg’s New York, the streets may still be potholed, but every new bathroom seems to be clad in Calacatta marble.

Ever since clawing its way back from the brink of economic collapse under Koch, New York City has undergone a dramatic transformation. But to lower-income New Yorkers untouched by the city’s new prosperity, it often feels like a cruel taunt that has only made life more difficult.

Jordan and Anne on the walk home from school.

Brooklyn is now the second most expensive place to live in America (after Manhattan), with townhouses that sell for $12 million and jars of pickles that sell for $9, but nearly half of its population can’t afford to live there. According to a recent study from the Center for an Urban Future, almost 40 percent of the borough’s population works in low-wage jobs, making less than $27,000 a year. At that salary, affordable rent (affordable is defined as costing no more than 30 percent of income) tops out at $675 a month. Minimum-wage workers can’t afford to pay more than $375 a month—a virtual impossibility.

A lot of people make do, of course. They triple up with relatives, live four to a room, work two jobs, display the scrappy ingenuity and hardscrabble bravado that we like to think of as quintessentially New York, until something goes wrong.

The huge increase in families seeking shelter is proof of how precarious the lives of New York’s working poor are. Family shelters house working parents and recently working ones like Ms. Pierre, a full-time home health aide until June. They are families who have long struggled to make ends meet but for whom homelessness is a new—though increasingly intractable—predicament. Last year, families spent more than a year on average in the shelter system for the first time since 1987. Advocates attribute their inability to leave to the fact that, in contrast to the last three decades, there are no longer subsidies available to help them move out of shelters and into permanent housing.

The current reality stands in sharp contrast to the ambitious plan Mayor Bloomberg presented in 2004 to reduce the shelter population by two-thirds and end chronic homelessness within five years by addressing “homelessness at its core, rather than at the margins.” It partly focused on preventative measures like eviction protection, which were widely lauded, but more controversially, it wiped out the paths to permanent housing, replacing them with temporary housing, on the assumption that families just needed a little help getting back on their feet.

“They thought that having paths to permanent housing was drawing people into the shelter system, so their approach to ending homelessness was to eliminate the path to permanent housing,” said Councilman Brad Lander, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies.

Determining how much of the blame should be laid at Mayor Bloomberg’s feet is a complicated question. While he and his policies have certainly presided over an unprecedented rise in the homeless population, the recession, the mounting cost of living and the national rise in homelessness are significant confounding variables.

Nonetheless, in the twilight of his last term, Mr. Bloomberg seems to have retreated from the battle, leaving the next mayor to solve a problem that has grown to monstrous proportions. In March, he blamed the surge in homelessness on the loss of state funding for Advantage—a program that issued temporary rental subsidies to thousands of shelter families from 2007 to 2011—but the Department of Homeless Services has not suggested any new programs to deal with the void left in its wake.

Still, the mayor’s approach to the spiking shelter population has also struck many as less than compassionate. New York magazine quoted him as saying “you can arrive in your private jet at Kennedy Airport, take a private limousine and go straight to the shelter system and walk in the door and we’ve got to give you shelter.”

Anne in the foyer of the shelter on Clarkson Street where the family used to live.

Anne Pierre doesn’t have a jet or a limousine. It was hard for her to rouse the boys on their first day at the new shelter, but the morning was full of promise. There was hot water, Ms. Pierre had a plan to try to get them eligible for shelter again, and she had heard about a home health aide service that might be hiring.

There were those little frustrations that can threaten to bring down a day—a late departure, unfamiliar streets, several people’s detailed though utterly unhelpful directions to the bus stop, and Tyler, impish even on a few hours of sleep, dropping Ms. Pierre’s hand and jogging backward down the sidewalk for a half block. But just as easily, the morning righted itself.

Having set off hesitantly toward the rumored bus stop, Ms. Pierre recognized a park, its pocked red running track dotted with figures in tracksuits. The park was not only familiar, it was just a few blocks from Jordan’s school—the school, she declared with amazement, was walkable. “Thank you God, his school is walkable,” she said, an exclamation she repeated in a tone of happy disbelief several times on the walk over.

For the rest of the journey, Tyler was charged with telling the family which way to turn at intersections and when it was safe to cross the streets. Though he is notorious for clowning and for a tendency to blurt out whatever he is thinking despite the social consequences, he went about the task obediently enough.

“Tyler has all of me,” Ms. Pierre says. “He’s like me when I was a kid. Don’t care if you get in trouble. Jordan is different. Jordan, Jordan watch everything. He talk around people if he like you. He plays with other kids, but he like to be by himself too. He needs time by himself and Tyler doesn’t want to give it to him, and they end up fighting.”

Anne Pierre rides the subway home. She spends much of her day in transit.

At a corner store across from Jordan’s school, P.S. 631, they stopped to buy breakfast sandwiches. Jordan fidgeted as they waited for the sandwiches. “It’s 9:05,” he said, looking at Ms. Pierre.

“I know,” she said.

School had started at 8:30, his third-grade regents exams were the following week, and he had missed school the day before because children need to be present when their parents reapply for shelter. As soon as Ms. Pierre had paid, he bolted out of the store, but not without hugging her goodbye. She watched until he disappeared behind the door.
“I have to see him go inside, in front of my eyes, or I worry,” she said. She meets him after school, too. “I’m one of those—I’m not going to say crazy mothers, I’m going to say worried mothers.”

Ms. Pierre worries a lot. She worries about where they’ll be living next, she worries about Jordan’s asthma and she worries about her 19-year-old daughter, Anna. Anna, who Ms. Pierre brought to the U.S. from Haiti as a 1-month-old infant when she herself was only 17, was living with them on Legion Street before they lost the apartment. She is now living with a girlfriend whom Ms. Pierre says is abusive and lies about whether Anna is home when the boys try to visit. Most of all, she worries on the days when she has to go to the intake center, the days when everything seems impossible and she has to plead for a new placement in a system that she doesn’t want to be in and whose rules she only half understands.

She did not, for example, understand that she could lose her Section 8 voucher for not finding a new apartment quickly enough after the last one was disqualified. Nor did she understand that, having lost it, she could not get it back (with more than 100,000 families, the waiting list is now closed). She had not understood how difficult it would be to find a new apartment by herself (the first broker she approached demanded a month up front as a deposit before showing her anything), and she had not understood that having a 4-year-old would be a problem.

Jordan and Anne studying a house in Brownsville.

But working 40 or more hours a week had meant little time to conduct an apartment hunt, which meant that she especially resented being shown decrepit one-bedrooms passed off as two-bedrooms by landlords taking advantage of the short supply of Section 8 housing. She was passed over for all the apartments she did apply for. One landlord explained that if she just had older kids, it wouldn’t be a problem, but a 4-year-old meant window grates and radiator covers and other modifications that he wasn’t willing to spend extra money on.

Other rejections were more vague, but they amounted to the same thing: by June, she didn’t have a place to live, and without a Section 8 voucher, she didn’t have the money to pay for one anyway. She was making $9 an hour—a step up from the $7.25 an hour she made when she started four years earlier, but her income was less than $20,000 a year even when she worked 48 hours a week, which she did as often as she could.

When Ms. Pierre and the boys entered the shelter system, she thought it would be temporary and even turned down an offer for public housing because it was far from Jordan’s school. But things went quickly downhill. The one-bedroom apartment she was assigned to in a dingy building on Clarkson and Nostrand was not ideal, but things would have been okay if Anna, who had just graduated from high school—one of the few in her class to graduate with a Regents diploma, Ms. Pierre noted proudly—had not moved out.

This was a problem because Anna watched Tyler when Ms. Pierre was at work. Not having anyone to watch Tyler meant that Ms. Pierre couldn’t start the next assignment her job offered her, and they gave it to someone else, which meant that she didn’t have any income for several weeks. She applied for public assistance, but before it came through her phone got cut off, which meant that she couldn’t get another work assignment because they wouldn’t give her one without a contact number.

It was simple and complicated at the same time. In a matter of months, she lost her house, her job and, it sometimes seemed, her daughter, who had dropped out of her college classes—she wanted to become a police detective someday—and moved in with the girlfriend, a woman Ms. Pierre described as a “bad influencer” who discouraged Anna from going out or talking to other people. With limited contact, Ms. Pierre and the boys have taken to walking past the girlfriend’s apartment on a regular basis, hoping to catch a glimpse of Anna.

“The last time I see her, her face has changed,” said Ms. Pierre. “Jordan is telling me we have to do something. I just keep waiting for her, but I’m afraid if she stay much longer, it will be too much damage. She’ll become someone else.”
Now everything Ms. Pierre wanted or needed seemed to rest on something else that she wasn’t able to do. When she reapplied for shelter, she was told she would not be eligible for a long-term placement without documentation of where she’d been living for the previous two weeks. She had been staying at Anna’s girlfriend’s place, but the girlfriend, whose name the apartment was under, refused to write the letter.

PS 631

Without a stable place to live, it had been hard to apply for jobs, but without a job, it seemed unlikely that they’d ever get a stable place to live. She misses her job, or at least the life it gave her.
“It’s freedom. When you work, it’s freedom,” she said. “You have money. When I worked, if I wanted something, I could buy it.”
Ms. Pierre’s plan, if she can “fix the house,” as she puts it, is to become a certified nursing aide, which she sees as more stable than being a home health aide, and ultimately to become a licensed practical nurse.

“From CNA you could go to an LPN. By the time I’m 40, I want to do it,” said Ms. Pierre, who is 37 now. “I would love to be a nurse, and I know I can do it. I know if I be a nurse, I could put my kids in a better school, a Catholic school.”
There is a class that she is planning to take as soon as they become at least eligible for long-term shelter again, because, she explained, it’s rumored to be difficult and “the head is supposed to be on the shoulders when you’re studying to be a nurse.”

She just wasn’t sure how she’d fix the housing situation beyond getting the letter and a long-term shelter placement, an improvement over their current itinerant state, but one that would still leave them homeless and at the mercy of the system, the bag searches, nightly sign-ins and strange rules (at Amboy, no blenders or TVs larger than 19 inches). But if she could get her Section 8 back, she’d move to Staten Island and start over, as much as a thing like starting over is possible.

“I’m tired of the same things over and over again,” she said. “I want to change things. I’ve been here so long, going through the same ups and downs so long. I want to go where I could work, pay my bills, take care of my kids. Maybe Staten Island—the boys and I went there and we liked it. It’s different than Brooklyn; it’s quiet, the spaces are bigger. I thought I was going to be afraid of the boat, but I just sit on the boat and I enjoy it.”

Anne Pierre on the subway.

When asked to account for the rapid rise in homeless families, Department of Homeless Services Commissioner Seth Diamond, echoing Mr. Bloomberg, pointed to the loss of the Advantage program, which was canceled in 2011 when its state funding was cut. Given that the Bloomberg administration had earlier stopped the long-standing practice of prioritizing homeless families for Section 8 and public housing, calling it bad public policy to let anyone entering the shelter system skip ahead in line (a claim advocates call highly specious), there was literally no way for shelter families to leave unless they could find an affordable living arrangement on their own.

“The increase is really tightly tied to the loss of Advantage. We were able to make progress and could have continued to help more households, but we will never get back the $150 million investment,” said Mr. Diamond. DHS provided statistics showing that in March of 2011, right before Advantage ended, there were 8,317 homeless families, 7 percent lower than the previous peak of 8,991 in 2009. He said that many fewer applicants are coming to the intake centers now, 8 percent less than last April, indicating that the crisis is abating and that DHS is “making good progress” even without any path to permanent housing. “The mayor has transformed the system,” he said.

Asked how families could leave the shelters without housing subsidies, Mr. Diamond said that “work works—the revolution across the board has been work.” He then went on to describe “enhanced training on the importance of work,” job-training programs and subsidies of the paychecks of homeless workers to encourage employers to take them on—none of which are new programs.

But a number of advocates claim that the Advantage program wasn’t working in the first place, primarily because the subsidy only lasted for two years; families who couldn’t make it on their own after that time just got channeled back into the shelter system. Ralph da Costa Nunez, the president of the Institute for Children, Poverty and Homelessness, who started out in the Koch administration, pointed to an increase in recidivism under the Advantage program (according to Mr. Diamond, 25 percent of families in the program returned to the shelter system).

“If you’re going to have a subsidy, you need to have a subsidy with a plan, not a subsidy with a dream,” said Mr. Nunez. “It’s a poverty problem, not a housing problem.”

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless, questioned the DHS assumptions that training people to become fast-food workers and home health aides, jobs that pay $8 or $9 an hour, would solve the problem. “How do you square the circle?” he asked. “These families are too poor to afford rent. Even in East New York or the South Bronx, rent is at least $1,000 a month.

“The mayor and his administration are people who craft their policies based on data, but in the area of homelessness, all their policies seem to be based on ideology,” he added.

Given that the city is mandated to provide shelter as the result of a 1980s court decision, and that Mr. Bloomberg appears to have no plan to transition residents out of shelters besides training for low-wage employment, it’s hard to imagine that anything will change.

Indeed, in the absence of any housing subsidy, shelters seem to have become New York’s answer to the lack of low-income housing. But shelters are an exceedingly expensive alternative. It costs, on average, $3,000 a month to house a family in a shelter, significantly more than the rent on a one- or two-bedroom apartment in the neighborhoods where many are located. The city also pays for homeless families’ storage lockers. And shelter life for any family is less than ideal, what with the room inspections, curfews, sign-ins, bag searches and often a ban on guests.

What’s more, said Mr. Nunez, while the costs of shelters was once higher because it included other resources to help families, many of the new shelters that have rapidly opened to meet the need are run by private operators who just provide rooms. And, seeing that they can essentially triple the rent with shelter tenants, landlords are pushing out the working-class families currently living in their buildings, perpetuating the cycle.

One of Ms. Pierre and the boys’ favorite topics is the house on Legion Street, which, while no palace (the mold was so bad that they once had to throw out a mattress that had been touching one of the walls), serves as a touchstone of what life used to be like and might be again. They talk about the food that Ms. Pierre made there—rice and beans, baked macaroni, oxtail, sweet plantains, corn on the cob. They talk about how Jordan used to ride the school bus and how much they miss Anna.

(Photo by Kim Velsey)

When they lived there, the kids would watch for Ms. Pierre from the back window, where they could see her getting off the train. “They used to fight about who would open the door for me, and I had to hug them all at the same time,” she said. “If not, it was going to be a problem.”

But when Ms. Pierre picked up Jordan from school that afternoon—she was running late, as she often is, and he chided her gently—they did not talk about Legion Street.

“When I was in school, I kept thinking of that apartment,” Jordan said. He meant 199 Amboy, and as they walked back there they discussed how clean it was and how they had been given a fresh shower curtain liner when they arrived, something you usually had to buy yourself. How they hoped they could become eligible again so they could stay, even if they hated the bag searches. They talked about how it was so close to Jordan’s school that he wouldn’t even need to take the bus, at least not until Ms. Pierre started working again.

They had reached the intersection of Blake and Amboy by then, and they stopped to lean against the fence of a little house kitty-corner from the shelter. Ms. Pierre said the shelter didn’t want people hanging around in front.
They discussed the food they would buy for school lunches when Ms. Pierre started working again and the apartments they had seen on Staten Island—how big and clean they were and how they had entire basements where you could store things.

Then Ms. Pierre started cataloging all the other things she would need to pay for: gas, light, clothes, rent. Even at $10 an hour, it was clear that the accounting didn’t quite work out.

Ms. Pierre was silent for a moment, the hopeful logic on which their conversation had cheerfully sailed broken, but then she turned to face the little house on whose fence she was leaning. She examined its hodgepodgey exterior, with its staid brick facade, red and white awning and granite porch too fancy for the house it was attached to. “This house is nice,” she said finally.

kvelsey@observer.com

Arbor House, a 124-unit affordable housing complex in the Bronx, embraced green building practices.

New York City's public housing complexes are small cities unto themselves, sealed off from the grid and flow of surrounding streets, pinwheels of bricks and concrete with scant patches of green. Built in 1956, Forest Houses, a 46-building New York City Housing Authority complex in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, is characteristic of its era. Besides the fact that the buildings top out at two stories, they do not relate to their immediate environment, let alone the environment.

More than 50 years later, affordable housing remains one of the city's greatest challenges (if not its greatest). The architecture, on the other hand, has improved considerably. Arbor House, a privately-owned 124-unit, housing complex that abuts Forest Houses, opened today at 770 East 166th Street. It boasts not only energy-efficient features and a living green wall, but also a 10,000 square foot hydroponic rooftop farm.

The living green wall.

"This building is incredibly advanced, it's at the forefront of green and affordable housing," RuthAnne Visnauskas, deputy commission of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development told The Observer. "It uses recycled materials and has been built with a big focus on air quality, which is really important for areas with high asthma."

Built via a public-private partnership between NYCHA, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development and Blue Sea Development, Arbor House is the result of a program that pairs dilapidated and vacant NYCHA land with private developers to create affordable housing. Since 2004, the program has produced some 2,000 units and has another 2,000 under construction and in pre-development in Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn.

Besides the living wall and the rooftop hydroponic farm, Arbor House has other features more commonly found in luxury developments than low-income housing: it's LEED platinum certified, has air-filtration systems, low and zero VOC finishes, indoor and outdoor exercise areas, and was built with local and recycled products. The eight-story building also has easily-accessible, windowed stairwells to encourage residents to take the stairs and thus increase their daily exercise.

The building's 124 rental units—16 studios, 33 one-bedrooms and 75 two-bedrooms with one superintendent apartment—are designated for low-income households earning less than 60 percent of the area median income, which is $49,800 for a family of four. Twenty-five percent will have a preference for NYCHA residents and those on NYCHA's waitlist. While the building's official opening was today, the building is not yet occupied; Ms. Visnauskas said that residents should start moving in within the next month.

Arbor House cost approximately $37.7 million, a cost that was heavily subsidized, with $36.76 million provided in the form of local, city and state subsidies, Reso A funds, tax credit equities and tax exempt bonds. Additionally, NYCHA sold the land to Blue Sea Development at below market rate.Ms. Visnauskas said that HPD is increasingly embracing green building practices—Via Verde, another HPD affordable housing complex in the Bronx whose units went on sale last year, was widely lauded for incorporating green building techniques, environmentally-friendly features and decked gardens. But she added many of Arbor House's features, particularly its living green wall and its rooftop farm, are a first for the department.

While many people tend to associate green building with additional expense, she said, this is not always the case. Indeed, features like windowed stairwells, smart thermostats and energy-efficient appliances save money in the long run. And the rooftop farm, to be operated by Sky Vegetables, is expected to generate money by selling produce—a percentage will be set aside for the building's residents and the local community to be purchased via CSAs and the rest will be sold commercially.

"We've been able to work innovative, green elements into our projects without bursting the bank" said Ms. Visnauskas. "In this case the urban farm is an income-generating business, it’s a productive use. Green building doesn't necessarily mean building more expensive, it means building smart."

kvelsey@observer.com

Housing, housing, everywhere, and not a room to rent. (Courtesy NYCHA)

Housing homies. (Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

Stepping off the elevator on the 12th floor of 250 Broadway, you pass by a dozen  photographs of idyllic, almost bucolic housing projects. The dogwoods are in bloom, matching the pink matting within the frames. That the pictures are a bit faded only adds to the utopianism of the scenes: families frolic in green grass courtyards, the sun is always shining.

These days, the picture is far less rosy: Apartments are overcome with toxic black mold, riven with cavernous leaks, overrun with rats, sometimes all three and then some. Repairs? Fuggetaboutit. Those will be years away. And that’s just inside; outside, it’s a war zone.

Or so the city’s tabloids would have you believe.

But the Housing Authority—or NYCHA, as almost everyone calls it, pronouncing it like some bureaucratic sneeze—represents much more than those run-down apartments we read about, of which there are fewer than the coverage suggests.

With more than 420,000 residents, NYCHA has a population that surpasses Atlanta. Factor in the 232,000 people who receive Section 8 vouchers, which NYCHA oversees, and it is larger than Denver, Seattle or Boston. The difference is that this mythical city would be made up of only the very worst neighborhoods—a world of Brownsvilles and Stapletons and Mott Havens without the Park Slopes and Upper East Sides to support them. This is both NYCHA’s biggest problem and its greatest virtue, a blessing and a curse passed down from Robert Moses, Fiorello LaGuardia and Franklin Roosevelt. Despite the eternal outcry over NYCHA’s shortcomings, most agree that the neighborhoods the projects inhabit would be even worse off without them. Who else is going to provide so many residents with affordable, if not always attractive, housing, in a city that has less and less?

Which is why the agency’s decline is so frustrating to so many. None more so than John Rhea, the man Mayor Bloomberg charged three years ago with fixing the problems—so many problems spread among so much real estate: 178,000 apartments in 334 complexes scattered across all five boroughs.

Of average height and trim build, Mr. Rhea still dresses like he’s headed to work at his last job, as a managing director at Barclays. On the morning of a two-hour interview with The Observer in the chairman’s conference room (as the sign outside the door said), his suit had a fine pinstripe. He wore a white shirt and red tie patterned with tiny Barrel of Monkey monkeys, hand-in-hand.

While he refuses to believe NYCHA’s troubles are intractable, he admits they are grave. “To me, the problem with NYCHA is gridlock. It’s no one actor but things piling up,” Mr. Rhea said. “It starts with an accident, then people are blocking the intersection, one truck is sticking out a little too far so one lane is jammed down. Everyone is trying to merge into fewer lanes. The traffic lights aren't changing.” Mr. Rhea sees himself as public housing’s traffic cop.

As if trapped in Bizarro World, NYCHA's story runs counter to the city's resurgence of the past two decades. When New York was in decline, the housing authority remained, thanks to federal largesse, a shining beacon of hope in the city even as everything around it was consumed. Now the situation has flipped. As the city swells, NYCHA has been suffering, thanks largely to neglect in Washington, where almost all of the authority's funds come from.

In many ways, the debate surrounding NYCHA mirrors those raging throughout the country over the role of government in society.

“It was the place to be, everyone was always hanging out at our place,” said City Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, who grew up in the Williamsburg Houses, New York’s second oldest housing development (the complex was even made a city landmark in 2003). "Even when the city started to get really bad in the '70s and '80s, NYCHA still had it all."

Now representing the East Village and the Lower East Side, Ms. Mendez has one of the largest tracts of public housing in her district. Since joining the council in 2006, she has chaired its public housing committee. She is a fierce advocate and frequent critic of NYCHA, but she is also quick to credit Mayor Bloomberg for supporting the authority when few others will.

“When John Rhea came in, I was skeptical,” she said. “I didn’t think we needed a banker, but I have to say, he’s done a good job. We’re seeing progress, but I don’t know if it’s enough. Given the situation we’re in, I don’t know if any one person could fix it.”

First Houses ground breaking. (La Guardia and Wagner Archives)

On December 3, 1935, Roosevelt, LaGuardia, Moses, Congressman Robert F. Wagner and what seemed like half the city crammed onto the corner of First Avenue and East Third Street to open First Houses. Thus began an era of American progress, a social experiment,  affordable housing for all, or at least those fortunate enough to win the housing lottery.

Before long, LaGuardia and his New Deal pals were on 105th Street for the East River Houses, and in Williamsburg, Red Hook, Queensbridge, ceremonial silver shovels in hand, breaking ground on dozens of new housing projects. By 1939, the mayor was regularly traveling around the country, advising cities like Newark, Providence and Philadelphia on how to follow suit. As important as affordable housing was, the construction was as much a jobs program as anything, a salve to the Depression. “In so many instances, it was a pioneering program,” said Ingrid Gould Ellen, long-time director of NYU’s Furman Center for Real Estate and Urban Policy.

The Great Migration, the Great Society and white flight, aided by discriminatory practices in the real estate industry, conspired to leave NYCHA’s developments with largely minority and lower-income tenants, rather than the economic mix that had been hoped for. Still, the projects gave birth to everyone from Lloyd Blankfein (Linden Houses, East New York) to Jay-Z (Marcy Houses, Bed-Stuy) and Sonia Sotomayor (Bronxdale Houses, Morisania, since renamed in her honor). Mr. Rhea’s goal, he said, “is to ensure that NYCHA can still foster these kinds of success stories.”

Like so many government programs from the era, the carefully planned social engineering did not always pan out. As Robert Caro and so many others have detailed, the new housing projects erased entire communities along the way. The new homes may have been affordable and modern, but they were not exactly inviting—especially as the technology progressed and the towers grew taller, more ominous and more dense.

Yet still they stand. NYCHA’s current repair bill systemwide tops $6 billion, and is expected to balloon to $14 billion in the next three years, many times the roughly $270 million NYCHA receives a year for capital expenditures.

One housing official marveled that some 10-year-old, privately developed low-income apartmentsare actually in worse shape than many 60-year-old public housing complexes. NYCHA, even with its massive portfolio, is held to a higher, perhaps impossible, standard. “Even in a perfect world, NYCHA would still have its problems,” said Julia Vitullo-Martin, director of the Center for Urban Innovation at the Regional Plan Association.

Starting in the Reagan era, federal funding, which makes up the vast majority of NYCHA’s non-rental income, began to diminish. Even during the Clinton administration, with welfare reform a national issue (and Andrew Cuomo running HUD), funding waned and talk of privatization was rampant. The situation deteriorated drastically during the Bush years, with federal funds falling to 69 cents on the dollar. NYCHA enjoyed full funding in President Obama’s first year in office, as well as $424 million in stimulus funds—the largest public housing grant awarded in the country. Since then, it has fallen by the wayside due to Congressional intransigence and presidential ambivalence.

“Obama has been hostile to public housing, which surprised a lot of people, since he came up working in it,” said John Arena, a professor at the College of Staten Island and housing expert.

“It is time for New York to realize we have to fight for what is ours, but we also have to be able to stand alone,” Mr. Rhea said. “We have too much at stake to rely on anyone but ourselves to make do.”

Williamsburg Houses, the city's second development (Skyscraper City)

Two thousand, six hundred apartment buildings—2,597 to be exact, built in neat little clusters in almost every corner of the city over the course of six decades. From a plane, or Google Maps, they are plainly visible from above, shocks of green and brown, big gaps in the city’s otherwise uniform street grid. They are pinwheels, crosses, long slabs of concrete and brick lined up like dominoes.

Such projects were once sprouting up across the country, but more and more, New York stands alone. In Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley demolished one notorious housing project after another, from Cabrini Green to Robert Taylor, names synonymous with urban blight and bureaucratic failure. He replaced them with new developments that lined the pockets of connected developers but housed half as many residents. In Atlanta, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Newark, New Orleans, the story has been the same.

“It’s a battle that’s still being fought here in New York, whereas it’s been given up in most every other big city,” said Victor Bach, a senior housing analyst at Community Services Society of New York.

Mayor Bloomberg is typically viewed as out of touch with the needy. After all, he called the city’s homeless shelters “pleasurable” last month. Nonetheless, he has done more for public housing than almost any other mayor in the country. He has invested more than $100 million into the housing authority and spent political resources on NYCHA when necessary, including drafting John Rhea to run the agency. Granted, his predecessors still received ample federal funding and could basically ignore the housing authority.

Mr. Rhea’s job is not unlike that of other outsiders recruited by the mayor. “NYCHA needed a change agent, and I think I have experience in being an insurgent—you know, going into an organization to make substantial change happen,” he said. “I also didn’t come with a set of preconceived notions about what was right or wrong structurally or strategically at NYCHA.”

Mr. Rhea grew up in inner-city Detroit, in a mixed-income neighborhood where he walked by housing projects and rundown homes on a regular basis. His father ran his own office furniture supply business, his mother was a medical technician He came east for school, attending the honors program at Wesleyan, where he majored in social studies. While attending Harvard Business School, he became friends with Barack Obama, who was then at the law school. He then went to work for the Boston Consulting Group in Chicago for three years, where the two remained friendly. He hosted the future president’s first fund-raiser in New York.

Mr. Rhea came to the city to work at JPMorgan Chase, where he arranged more than $50 billion in deals, and then went to Lehman Brothers, where he rose through the ranks to become head of global consumer retail group. He sees himself as a business facilitator, rather than a money-maker (though there was plenty of that too). It was this skill that attracted the Bloomberg administration, along with his management experience at both firms.

When Lehman collapsed, Mr. Rhea found himself with a job at Barclays when it bought up Lehman’s investment banking division. But he had long felt called to public service, and the moment seemed right. He considered heading to Washington, but when word got out he was in the market for a public-sector position, the Bloomberg administration approached him first.

He said that the banking crisis played no role in his decision to leave Wall Street, and someday he could even go back.

“Rightly or wrongly, I didn’t personally feel guilt. I wasn’t a real estate banker, I didn’t put together complicated derivatives, I didn’t sell subprime mortgages, I didn’t have any role at all in housing,” Mr. Rhea explained. “As an American, watching the financial debacle that had many culprits—the financial industry being one, but government policy being another, and just excess, sheer excess in the economy—I didn’t feel guilt but I certainly felt responsibility. I don't know how any American can watch what we went through and not feel some level of concern for the fellow citizens who were truly impacted.”

John Haynes Holmes Houses, Yorkville. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Mr. Rhea's financial experience experience has come in handy at the cash-strapped NYCHA. “Washington has been very clear in saying that there are $30 billion of unmet capital needs for public housing nationally and it doesn’t have the capacity to fund them,” Mr. Rhea said. “Therefore, housing authorities have to think about other ways of availing themselves if they want to maintain their buildings—other ways of attracting capital, and having conversations with residents and advocates about those options, and how we pursue them and what the risks are.”

One of the first projects Mr. Rhea tackled was creating an office of public-private partnerships, a controversial move. Public housing, the bedrock of the so-called safety net in New York, is considered sacrosanct in advocacy circles. Any private involvement, it is feared, will poison the well. How long until everything has been sold off?

Mr. Rhea insists the housing advocates have nothing to fear, and if they are serious about rebuilding NYCHA, they will have to be creative. When an idea was floated internally to possibly put billboards on some of the housing project’s towers, it was exposed in the Daily News and quickly shot down. The outcry was understandable, but what if it meant a new security system or money to reopen a community center or fix up a basketball court?

“What I find incredibly amazing is that the press can say NYCHA isn’t doing anything,” Mr. Rhea said. He said he has proposed “some of the most intransigent, kind of radioactive” ideas, about which NYCHA has been totally upfront. “We’ve put them out there, we’ve said, ‘Here’s what we plan to do about them,’ we’re fully transparent about it, and we’re willing to have a conversation about what are the implications of what’s being proposed.”

Mr. Rhea’s most impressive victory was the federalizationof thousands of units that had been cast off in the previous decade by the city and state. Completed at the end of 2009, it was a reminder that Washington was not the only political culprit. In the late 1990s, Gov. George Pataki offloaded some 21,000 units of public housing the state had built and maintained for decades. The city pulled the same trick in 2002 with a number of developments it controlled, following a devastating blow to the budget as a result of 9/11.

The vast majority of these units had no federal support, thousands of apartments drawing against the rest of NYCHA’s funds. Through a deal with HUD, federal matching funds, however insufficient, are now provided for the entire NYCHA portfolio. The federalization deal also brought in an injection of $400 million in public and private financing, a never-before-attempted partnership meant to modernize many of the most dilapidated developments. “Standing up at the podium with the secretary of HUD and the mayor, the federalization deal being announced and knowing what that meant, that was a huge victory,” Mr. Rhea said. “It shows we can get things done.”

Queens Bridge Houses, Long Island City. (David Saunders/Flickr)

Still, Mr. Rhea’s job has been far from easy. Another of his marquee achievements is Plan NYCHA, essentially a strategy outline subtitled “A Roadmap for Preservation.” At 45 pages, it took more than two years to create, drawing lukewarm reviews when it came out in 2011.

“It’s a scrapbook,” remarked Mr. Bach. “It mentions some important policies, but it doesn’t go into them at all. It devotes most of its space to pictures of resident participation.”

Mr. Rhea defends it as more of a vision statement than a detailed blueprint. “You can’t give people the thousands and thousands of pages of research and documentation that we’ve done and expect them to digest it,” he said. “This allows people to help us guide individual projects moving forward.”

The same goes for the Boston Consulting Group report commissioned by the chairman that has led to some of the harshest media attention on the authority in memory. Begun in March 2011, the report was due to be completed the following September at a cost of $5 million. The study was extended through the following April, and the price tag doubled. In part, this speaks to the complexity of NYCHA—it takes 12,000 employees to manage that city of half a million—but also to a lack of political awareness on the part of Mr. Rhea.BCG is known for its experience in advising government agencies, but it also happens to be where the chairman worked after business school. The Daily News got wind of the report in June and began to demanding its public release. Mr. Rhea demurred.

“If he had public-sector experience, John would have known the report was going to get out, whether or not he wanted it to,” said one City Hall housing expert. “He’s focused on the product, not the politics, and that has its perils.”

Smelling blood, the paper began digging around in the authority and came up with a damaging story. NYCHA had, in the words of the tab, been “sitting on” nearly $1 billion in federal money dating back to 2009.

As bad as that sounded, it was not exactly accurate. In fact, 90 percent of the $950 million had been allocated already, and while $485 million had yet to be spent, that was not unusual. Between appropriations, requests for proposals, and approvals at nearly a dozen different agencies in Washington and New York, it can take up to three years for HUD funds to make their way from Capitol Hill to the streets of Canarsie or Kingsbridge. Furthermore, $540 million the News was complaining about had only been announced in the past six months to a year. Never mind that those numbers had been provided directly to the paper by NYCHA’s public affairs office as a sign of progress.

“That kind of lack of detail leaves a reader with the impression that if you’re Mrs. Smith and your ceiling is falling in, that NYCHA’s not going to do what it’s supposed to do, when it has all of the resources it needs to do that,” Mr. Rhea complained. “When you don’t say you need 6 billion, and you only have a billion, you leave out the fact that even if we snapped our fingers tomorrow and spent it all in the most efficient way, you still have five out of six people still upset about the quality of their conditions.”

To make matters worse, the tab ran accompanying pieces showing apartments full of black mold and rat holes. As bad as that is, the argument was disingenuous. Small repairs come out of the operations budget, while the billion dollars at issue was in capital funds. It is the difference between fixing a leaky ceiling and repointing the bricks in an entire complex to protect against weather damage. Not that NYCHA could rob from capital funds to pay for regular maintenance anyway. It is forbidden to dip into one pot to fund the other, and doing so could actually lead to serious sanction in Washington. A number of council members had to hold a hearing on the steps of City Hall to praise Mr. Rhea, fearing the negative publicity would imperil NYCHA. “That is my gravest concern, the message this will send to Washington,” Ms. Mendez said. “They treat us badly enough as it is.”

At least a few housing advocates believe Daily News owner and publisher Mortimer Zuckerman is working on behalf of the real estate industry to cripple the authority and thereby open up its prime land (along the East River, in Chelsea, on the Upper West Side, in Williamsburg and Red Hook) to development. Nevermind that Mr. Zuckerman exclusively develops commercial real estate.

Another prominent example of the gotcha news involves $42 million the City Council allocated for security cameras in 2009. While desperate for more funding, Mr. Rhea decided to suspend the council contributions to determine exactly the best use for them. In his view, many developments had security systems in place, but they were not having an appreciable impact on crime. He created the Safety and Security Task Force to meet with residents and better understand the issue. “John Rhea decided to freeze our money,” Councilwoman Mendez said. “I didn’t like it, but it was the right thing to do, and now, hopefully, we’ll get the right cameras, the right security, for the right developments.” Instead, the News lamented a rise in crime while NYCHA was developing the new security plan.

While trying to have the BCG report released, the News complained that the 87-page document cost $124,000 a page. “That’s just stupid,” Mr. Rhea said. “How about we talk about how the report could save NYCHA $70 million a year. It pays for itself seven times over in the first year.”

Mr. Rhea’s favorite story was the one about the $325,000 he spent for a two-day conference at the Javits Center that brought every NYCHA employee together to share their thoughts about the agency—an event painted as a management-driven boondoggle. To Mr. Rhea, it was part of a necessary refocusing. “At $30 a person, I would say that wasn’t a waste of money, to be able to hear the ideas and concerns of every one of my employees,” Mr. Rhea said.

“You can worry about the optics or the politics, or if you look like you’re doing a good job,” he continued. “We don’t need that. We don’t need another person just going through the motions. We don’t need more pageantry. We’re looking to make a difference.”

This is what it's all about. (Courtesy Kars 4 Kids)

Is there enough time, resources or authority to make a difference? Despite widespread praise from housing advocates, many question whether or not Mr. Rhea can truly effect the change he speaks constantly of. After decades of disinvestment, no one person could turn around NYCHA in four years.

Still, there are advocates who argue the mayor could be doing more to support his chairman. Mr. Bach, the housing analyst at the Community Services Society, points to the billions of dollars the city funnels every years to private developers through the city’s Economic Development Corporation, the millions more given to parks, museums, even new stadiums. “There’s absolutely no comparison, and there’s no comparable attention and support to the New York City Housing Authority,” he said. How much time has the mayor spent promoting a ban on soft drinks this year? How much time has he spent on promoting NYCHA? It’s a question of political capital, Ms. Vitullo-Martin of the Regional Plan Association said.

Yet political capital does not always get results either. Consider education, an area on which the Bloomberg administration has focused tirelessly. “The solutions are not always easy, clear, or even possible,” Ms. Vitullo-Martin said.

Perhaps the experience of another public authority might guide NYCHA back on the right track. “In the 1970s, the MTA was on the verge of collapse, and in the ’80s, it really executed an amazing turnaround,” said Fred Harris, NYCHA’s new director of development, who led the MTA’s real estate portfolio at the time before spending two decades in private development. “I think NYCHA is at a point where it needs to make the same transformation.”

The comparison may be apt for another reason. Despite all the improvements at the MTA, everybody still complains about it.

Last Thursday, without a cloud in the sky, John Rhea stepped out of his city-issued Toyota hybrid SUV and onto the leafy quad of Baisley Park Houses in Jamaica, Queens. He had on a navy suit, no pinstripe, light blue check shirt and matching tie. Local Councilman Reuven Willis, who grew up in the nearby South Jamaica Houses, had recruited Kars 4 Kids, a North Jersey Jewish charity, to hand out backpacks to families from the projects. “It is critically important these kids have the resources they need to succeed on the first day of school,” Mr. Rhea said, touting yet another of his public-private partnerships.

NYCHA had paid to rebuild the project’s community center three years ago, but it so far lacked the funds to open it. Instead, money would soon be spent on those new cameras, after two years of debate, and just in time—a police officer had been shot less than a month earlier. Mr. Willis went up the block to show off a basketball court that had been recently refurbished with a new coat of paint and a good weed whacking. It took 16 months, but it had been decades since anything had been done, and a totally new court was on the horizon, so he remained excited. "He came in, he met with my people, asked what we wanted, and he delivered," Mr. Willis said.

Scaffolding encircles many developments, suggesting repairs when there are none. It frustrates tenants, according to Mr. Willis, but he can live with it as long as more important problems are being tackled. Public housing, a work in progress.

“Growing up, did I know the NYCHA chairman? No. But everybody here does,” Mr. Willis said, gesturing around the quiet street. And it was true, he was getting hugs and fist bumps from many in the crowd, though also some tough questions about the community center. Mr. Rhea promised he was hard at work on the problem.

As Mr. Rhea rushed off to one more backpack giveaway, before a day of meetings in the city, he paused to consider the work he was doing. “I don’t want you to think I’m all pie in the sky,” he said. “I know we’ve got a lot left to do, and the challenges are huge in turning this around. We have another 15 months to run hard to put a bunch of runs on the board, to execute against the plan.”

He looked back at the kids holding their new backpacks aloft and smiled. “I wish this was the only part of my job.”

Housing hope. (Brownstoner)

All the local scrutiny of the city’s Housing Authoirty this summer has caught Washington’s attention, as well, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development is reviewing the public housing agency’s books to make sure everything is in order, according to a spokesman.

The review began earlier this month, HUD public affairs officer Jerrod Brown said, and was prompted by reports in the Daily News of mismanaged funds. Mr. Brown stressed that the review was still in its earlier stages and was not a condemnation or confirmation any wrongdoing of NYCHA. Instead, the review is a matter of practice.

“News reports like the series on NYCHA often result in reviews, audits and investigations,” Mr. Brown said in an email. “Some recent examples are Philadelphia and the Harris County Housing Authority in Texas.” In those cases, officials in Phillie and Houston were misspending federal funds. In the former case, there were some lavish gifts, well documented (or poorly documented, in the case of the accused), including a party with show girls.

So far the charges against NYCHA have been far less, namely that the agency does not work fast enough, but that has been the focus of an internal investigation the agency has been conducting on itself. Some money has not been spent simply due to the wheels of bureaucracy turning. With the largest housing agency in the country, New York can take years to put the billions of dollars in federal funds it receives to use.

Mr. Brown said the review was not prompted by calls to action from any local politicians, such as would-be Congressman Hakeen Jeffries, who recently held a press conference calling for a full investigation of NYCHA’s practices.

Last week, Councilwoman Rosie Mendez, chair of the housing committee and a defender of NYCHA, told The Observer she thought an investigation was unnecessary. "The money is getting spent," she said. "The reports are false and misleading, so I don't know that an investigation is prudent."

A NYCHA spokeswoman declined to comment on the review until it was completed.

Mr. Brown said HUD already took an enthusiastic view of some changes NYCHA has announced following an internal review of the agency performed by the Boston Consulting Group.

"We support changes to the structure of the Board, and look forward to working with NYCHA to ensure that the board structure is consistent with best practices nationally," Mr. Brown said. "We are fully committed to working with NYCHA, its residents, and other key stakeholders to improve NYCHA and strengthen its ability to meet its current and future challenges."

Richmond Hill, one of two pilot developments. (HPD)

"We've been doing it the same way since before we had email," affordable housing developer Martin Dunn lamented, speaking to The Observer about the grueling process through which New Yorkers have historically had to apply for subsidized housing in the city.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn put it even more starkly in her 2011 State of the City address, when she called on the Bloomberg administration to find a way to digitize and streamline the process: "In a 21st century world—where you can do everything online—we still make people apply for housing using 18th century technology."

Today is the day, as they say, and as of working hours, NYC Housing Connect should be live, the first one-stop shop for subsidized housing online.

"This lets our customers do four important things: learn, look, save and apply," Department of Housing Preservation and Development Commissioner Matthew Wambua said. "This is an initiative we're incredibly proud of because we believe it will streamline the process for everyone."

Historically, applicants for affordable housing had to reach out to each individual developer about any developments they were interested in applying to, then fill out a separate application for each. Not only does the new website centralize the projects, as well as information about who is eligible for affordable housing in the city, but it also it also simplifies the application process.

What makes the new system so special is it allows users to create a profile that they can use for each and every application, so there is no need to continually fill out the same forms over and over again. The system even saves user profiles for easy updating. Should an applicants income go up or down or an address change, he or she simply needs to input it the criteria will be updated for future project.

This automation also helps with the various calculations required of applicants, one of the areas where the department said it saw the most errors. The other big advantage for applicants is that the system will allow them to immediately be notified when their applications is received and its status. "Sometimes we're flooded with 15,000 or 20,000 applicants for a particular project, so it can be just impossible to respond to everyone by hand, but this way we can," Kaye Matheny, the Deputy Commissioner for Strategic Planning, Technology and Administration said.

For developers it means more, and more accurate, applications. "For a lottery by hand, on the bigger projects, we can have 20 people doing it by hand over three or four days," said Mr. Dunn, who is one of two developers taking part in the pilot phase of Housing Connect. His Dunn Development Corp. is launching Westwind Houses, located at 45 East 131st Street, through the program, making the 47 low-income-restricted units available both online and in print.

The other project is Richmond Place, a 117-unit project in the Richmond Hill Section of Queens, developed by the Arker Companies, a third-generation developer of affordable housing. "Any time you can rent up quicker, it's to everyone's benefit," Dan Moritz, a principal at Arker, said. "A larger pool of applicants and a faster turnaround is a win-win for us and the city."

The department stressed that paper applications will still be accepted, to ensure no one feels alienated by the new process, but partnerships will also be forged with various community groups to ensure as many individuals as possible who want to can apply online. The pilot will run through the fall, at which point the department will begin to add more developments to the site, assuming all goes well.

"I think anything that makes it easier for the public to get access to information about housing resources is always a good thing," said Jerilyn Perine, chair of the Citizens Housing and Planning Commission and a former housing commissioner. "As long as they have the traditional applications, this should be to the benefit of everybody."

Ms. Perine even thought of one group of New Yorkers who might take a keener interest in such properties. "Will the hipsters move in, now that it's online?" she wondered. "Well, they're legally entitled, if they fit the criteria, but so is everyone else, and that's the wonderful thing about subsidized housing. I don't know that it will change anything about the make up affordable housing, except to make it easier for everyone to apply."

Fixing homes from the bully pulpit. (William Alatriste/City Council)

In between heavy dollops of sentiment, Christine Quinn cemented some specific plans to combat the affordable housing problem and the facilitation of upgrading the City’s landlord maintenance code in her State of the City address last week.

Ms. Quinn outlined how the Housing Preservation and Development Department is extending affordability to 60 years for some of the biggest developments. Affordability agreements currently stand at just the 30-year mark.

How affordability agreements work is, the City provides incentives to developers and in exchange they make units affordable, but the current 30-year watermark is seen as too short in the face of the steady march to urban gentrification and the unceremonious shoving out of decade-long residents. The issue of affordable housing has turned into a weighty one recently, becoming a go-to subject for many would-be Mayoral candidates.

“Sixty years isn’t permanent,” said Ms. Quinn, “but it’s a critical first step”. She is championing a move toward what she called "permanent affordability." She is going to work on correcting what she finds as archaic legislation, which sees veterans' tax exemptions inexplicably linked to how much the City spends on schools. “Is that a classic government kick in the pants, or what?” Ms. Quinn said.

In a speech that was laden with wistful recollections of a New York of days of yore, full of kinship and camaraderie, Ms. Quinn also urged the City to create a new program to help get the some 10,000 homeless families into long-term housing. She wants to prioritize homeless families for NYCHA apartments. “This isn’t just the right thing to do,” said Ms. Quinn, “it’s the fiscally responsible thing to do. The average cost of a rental subsidy for a family of four is $800 a month. To house that same family in a shelter? $3,000.”

The theme of rehousing the homeless offered a nice segue into her next topic: the state of housing maintenance. She criticized landlords at large, and the City’s own NYCHA, for taking “years for repairs that take less than an hour to make.” Ms. Quinn called for modifications to be made to the City’s housing maintenance code that would compel landlords to fix the root cause of building problems, and not just the short-term issue.

“Instead of just fixing water damage, landlords will have to repair the hole in the roof that's causing it,” Ms. Quinn said. “Slumlords will have to spend real money and fix the real problem or we’ll haul them into housing court.” She reiterated her urgency on the timeliness of repairs: “Not in a year. Not in a month. Today”.

"'How will the NYCHA be able to scale to this level of productivity,' you say? Well funnily enough the Council are upping the funding for NYCHA for this year and in doing so creating 175 new jobs."

Yes, before you know Ms. Quinn will have us back to those glory years she speaks of: Kick the can games on every street, suffocating smell of cabbage from every kitchen and the hanging of laundry out every window.

sduffy@observer.com

Two of the 22 tenement buildings on the south side of 114th Street, all of which are vacant. (Property Shark)

Better days are ahead for the Randolph Houses on West 114th Street—not that the 36 tenement buildings in Central Harlem have ever truly known good days.

Built in the 1890s, along with thousands of other substandard cold water flats serving the booming population of European immigrants, the buildings were abandoned amidst white flight. Like so many other unwanted apartments of that generation, they were taken over by the city in the 1970s and turned into public housing. Attempts at upkeep have been made over the years, but the upkeep never really was, well, kept up. The buildings have deteriorated to such a state that only 109 of their 452 units are occupied, but the city cannot afford to fix them.

To finally revive the Randolph Houses, the city’s Housing Authority and Department of Housing Preservation and Development are partnering with a private developer to retrofit the properties into modern, low-income housing. A request for proposals was released last week, and the winning developer will be charged with transforming the buildings into a mix of 140 public housing units and at least 155 affordable housing units.

"At the Randolph Houses we are not just breathing a new life into these buildings—we are creating new homes, new opportunities, and a more affordable and sustainable New York," HPD Commissioner Mathew Wambua said in a release.

This is a reduction in the overall number of apartments, including the number of NYCHA units, though for myriad technical (and wonkishly interesting!) reasons, it is actually a three-fold gain for the city’s subsidized housing stock.

It is not simply a matter of disrepair but safety that the Randolph Houses have lost hundreds apartments. The deterioration is so bad that those units are no longer legally habitable. The entire south side of the street, comprising 307 apartments, sits vacant. And since NYCHA only receives federal funds from HUD for occupied apartments, an increase to 140 from the current 109 will actually mean more money for the agency.

“Technically, it’s a reduction in the number of units, but it’s an increase in the number of units that are online today,” Amy Chester, deputy director of NYCHA’s development department, told The Observer.

Why NYCHA is not building 452 refurbished units is another matter. Because of a HUD calculation known as total development costs, only so much money is allocated per unit to housing authorities across the country for construction and maintenance of buildings. With New York’s especially  high construction costs, these funds never cover the full price of construction and rehabilitation projects.

This is not the only reason a partnership with HPD and an outside developer is necessary. Theoretically, NYCHA could take out a loan to cover the difference in costs, but HUD forbids public housing rents be used to cover loan repayments. That is why a developer is needed, to create affordable housing units—in this case pegged a family of four making $49,080, or 60 percent of the area median income—to cross-subsidize the project. (To clarify, the distinction between affordable housing and public housing is that the former is built and managed by private developers with oversight by HPD while the latter is wholly owned and managed by NYCHA as part of the Section 8 housing program. Both are allocated to tenants through income-restricted lotteries.)

The north side of the Randolph Houses are still occupied, though some units sit empty. (Property Shark)

Another factor is a federal statute dating from the 1990s, the Faircloth limit.. This caps the number of public housing unit’s a city can have. Essentially, New York cannot build new projects, certainly not on the scale seen during the middle of last century, and must instead manage the number it has, subtracting a few dozen or hundred from one project while adding others elsewhere.

“NYCHA can’t or won’t be building a new super block with 3,000 units like we used to,” Ms. Chester said. “But you also can’t build solely public housing because of TDC. Whatever you build, it has to be cross-subsidized.”

Those good with math will realize that the city is calling for only about 300 apartments in the redeveloped projects, a reduction of more than 30 percent in the number of units. This is because most of the apartments at the Randolph Houses date to the turn of the last century, when the original buildings were built. "If you go to the Tenement Museum, it looks just love that." Others have been even further subdivided, creating unhealthy and even illegal—they violate current building codes—living conditions.

This addition-by-subtraction might frustrate some hard-line housing advocates, who see any reduction in the city’s low-income housing stock as a threat to New York’s livability and diversity, but Harold Shutz, a senior fellow at the Citizen’s Housing and Planning Commission, thinks the city is making the most of what it has. "I think it’s a very reasonable response to a bad situation," he said. "On the whole a positive, though the advocates probably won’t see it that way."

"They're not only brand-spanking-new apartments, but they're also going to have better units, in terms of quality of life," Ms. Chester said. The repairs being undertaken include removing the back portion of the buildings to create a deeper rear yard, which allows for more light and air to reach the apartments but also reduces the size of the buildings. "Some of the bedrooms are without closets while others barely have room for beds," Ms. Chester said.

Another big benefit is that the program will help reoccupy an entire block of historical architecture. Even if the tenement style may be unloved, it played an epochal role in the shape of the city, its buildings and its inhabitants, so much so the Randolph Houses have been considered for state historic preservation status.

The agencies have undertaken similar projects before. At the Chelsea, Elliott and Forest houses, new HPD affordable housing projects have been built on NYCHA land. The most notorious example may be Prospect Plaza, in Brownsville, where four hulking towers are being demolished and replaced with more contextual, rowhouse type blocks of affordable housing.

What makes the Randolph Houses unique is this is the first time affordable and public housing units will be intermixed within the same buildings. "This initiative is a first by utilizing a HUD mixed finance program combining public and non-public housing in a single development," NYCHA Chairman John Rhea said in the release. "We look forward to the successful rehabilitation of Randolph Houses as a model for future redevelopment.”

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC