They say no good deed goes unpunished — or, at the New York City Housing Authority, unprotested.
Long-suffering public housing tenants in East Harlem and downtown Brooklyn will, per a promising new plan, be getting desperately needed new bathrooms, kitchens, windows and much more.
Those interviewed by the Daily News greeted the planned fixes not with exultation, not with “tell us more,” but with withering attacks on the authority.
Help? How dare they!
“I think they’re trying to force us out,” accused one resident at the Wyckoff Gardens project in Gowanus, Brooklyn.
Said a Manhattan tenant leader of plans for the Holmes Towers on the Upper East Side: “They’re nuts. They’re absolutely insane.”
Tenants are up in arms because dead-broke NYCHA intends to pay for the overhauls by leasing land within each project to developers, who could build hundreds of new apartments at each site on the proviso that they would keep half the new units affordable.
NYCHA envisions turning underused parking lots and a playground (to be moved and rebuilt) into cash. A fine idea, as it was when the Bloomberg administration floated similar plans with a smaller share of affordable housing.
Anyone with a better plan for helping NYCHA begin to fill a $17 billion repair-budget hole had better pipe up now.
No, not you, Rep. Carolyn Maloney. Knowing full well that her Congress has for years starved NYCHA of repair funds, she nonetheless slammed the authority for stealing “light, air and playground space.”
Unhelpful. Because there’s no such thing as a NYCHA fairy who will pay to keep the authority’s aging buildings habitable.
NYCHA Chair Shola Olatoye appears steeled to stay the course. Mayor de Blasio should stand solidly by her, ignore fear-mongering nay-sayers and make sure that an agency with a tradition of mismanagement gets this one right.
