Two Brooklyn-based affordable housing advocacy groups are pushing to revive a 2014 plan by City Comptroller Scott Stronger to earmark surplus funds from the Battery Park City Authority (BPCA) for upgrades in the crumbling apartments blocks operated by the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) for the poorest New Yorkers.
At a Monday rally in front of City Hall, the Metro Industrial Areas Foundation and the East Brooklyn Congregations, which together represent thousands of residents of NYCHA housing projects, demanded that the administration of Mayor Bill de Blasio reconsider its veto of Mr. Stringer’s proposal. Reverend David K. Brawley, pastor of the St. Paul’s Community Baptist Church in the East New York section of Brooklyn, thundered, “Housing is a right,” as the thousand-plus crowd erupted in cheers. “We are ready for a fight,” he continued, “to fight for the soul of the city.”
Mr. Stringer, who also spoke at the rally, said, “let’s create a revenue stream of $400 million — $40 million a year over ten years, so that we can finally give NYCHA what it needs the most: a new revenue stream, for the first time ever in modern history.”
The Comptroller proposes to do this by diverting excess revenue from the BPCA to NYCHA. Such an agreement would not represent any increased cost to Battery Park City residents, whose financial obligations to the BPCA are specified in the ground lease that governs property ownership in the community. The terms of this contract cannot be modified without the consent of all parties to the agreement. Instead, Mr. Stringer’s proposal would create a new process for distributing the money that Battery Park City property owners have always paid to the Authority.
For decades, the BPCA’s excess revenue — essentially the cash flow from ground rents, and payments in lieu of taxes (PILOT), along with other fees, after payments to bond holders and expenses for operations have been subtracted — has theoretically been dedicated to affordable housing around the five boroughs. A series of agreements between the Authority and various mayoral administrations have memorialized this pledge, but have also left mayors with sufficient wiggle room to allow them to divert the funds to almost any other purpose, if they chose to.
Since the early 1990s, the BPCA has conveyed more than $1 billion in such excess revenue to the City. But even when mayors have used BPCA funds for affordable housing, they have had broad discretion on how and where it was spent. (Newly built or renovated apartments often took priority over repairs at the oldest public developments, serving the poorest New Yorkers.)
City Comptroller Scott Stringer: “Let’s create a revenue stream of $400 million — $40 million a year over ten years, so that we can finally give NYCHA what it needs the most, a new revenue stream, for the first time ever in modern history.”
Mr. Stringer’s proposal is novel in several ways. First, he wants a legally binding agreement that would earmark these funds for maintenance at NYCHA properties. Second, he hopes to create a protocol so that “funds are tracked to ensure that they supplement, not supplant, current revenue sources, and are expended in a manner that is equitable, efficient and responsive to the most pressing needs of NYCHA residents.” And third, he is proposing that (in the event BPCA revenues exceed expectations), these additional funds also be committed to shoring up NYCHA’s balance sheet.
NYCHA operates 334 public housing developments around the five boroughs, housing more than 400,000 low- and moderate-income residents. (More than three quarters of NYCHA tenants live at or below the poverty line.) Among NYHCA properties, 110 developments (or roughly one-third of the total) are more than 50 years old. In 2014, NYCHA had a budget shortfall of $77 million, and unfunded capital needs of $18 billion. This grim fiscal picture has led to spike in violations of health, fire, safety, and building regulations, such as leaking roofs, broken heating systems, missing or cracked windows, mold, buckling walls, and collapsing ceilings.
The de Blasio administration prides itself on its ambitious goals on affordable housing, which include more than 77,000 units created or preserved since 2014, along with plans to build or rehabilitate some 200,000 such homes in the next seven years.
But the Mayor’s plan has also drawn criticism for providing a disproportionate number of these dwellings to middle- and working-class New Yorkers, and relatively few to the poorest residents of the City. In 2014, Mr. de Blasio rejected Ms. Stringer’s original proposal (which had been endorsed by Governor Cuomo), because the wanted the excess BPCA revenue directed toward his broader affordable housing plan, rather than specifically to NYCHA.