A pamphlet by Dare to Struggle
Everyone living in NYCHA projects has seen the signs of public housing falling apart over the last decade: buildings with water leaks and no heat in the winter, and apartments with mold, broken pipes, holes in the walls, rat and roach infestations, and broken appliances. This is why we say that NYCHA is the biggest slumlord in New York. Why is NYCHA allowing public housing to deteriorate? Why does NYCHA think it’s acceptable for public housing residents to live like this?
It’s because the government is moving to get rid of public housing as we know it. Over the last several decades, the federal government has defunded public housing by billions of dollars, leaving little money to fix and maintain the buildings. In cities across the country, many housing projects have been demolished, with their residents displaced and some becoming homeless. In Chicago, the high rise projects near downtown where tens of thousands of people lived, such as Cabrini-Green, were all demolished in the 2000s in the name of “urban development,” i.e., gentrification. Some projects have been converted to “mixed income housing,” which is just another way of kicking residents out. And in New York, when individual apartments in the projects become vacant, NYCHA often doesn’t move new tenants in, despite the long waiting list for public housing.
By defunding the projects, the government created today’s crisis of public housing, and now they’re coming up with fake “solutions” that are excuses to destroy what’s left of public housing. In 2011, the Obama administration created the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program. What RAD does is transform housing projects from Section 9 to Section 8 housing. What’s the difference? Section 9 is publicly owned, federally funded housing in which tenants have more rights, can pass their apartment on to their family members, and cannot be easily evicted. Section 8 means tenants receive a rent voucher from the federal government which they pay to private landlords. So under Section 8, a private landlord has the power to evict tenants.
With RAD, the government is moving to privatize public housing. Project buildings and the land they’re on might still be publicly owned, but private landlords and real estate developers become responsible for running the buildings. The government claims this will facilitate repairs getting done, but in reality it turns over public housing to companies who are only interested in profit, and will have increasing power over tenants, including the power of eviction. The government claims there are protections for tenants under RAD, but why should we trust them? The government also claims that the RAD program will create more funding to make repairs by leveraging debt and equity on housing, but this means private landlords will be playing with your rent money. We just have to look at the role that financial speculation on housing played in the 2008 financial collapse to know how that could turn out (just watch the movie The Big Short).
Gentrification has already displaced Black, Latino, immigrant, working-class, and poor people from their neighborhoods across the country. In New York, we see shiny new condominiums being built while more people become homeless or have to leave NYC because of rising rents. It’s the very same landlords and real estate developers responsible for gentrification and pushing working-class people out of NYC that are now becoming the private management of NYCHA buildings under RAD. This is why we say NO NYCHA PRIVATIZATION.
The state of disrepair in NYCHA buildings is in part caused by government defunding. But it’s also deliberate. By making the projects unlivable, NYCHA knows that those who can will move out, and those who cannot will be more willing to go along with privatization if they are tricked by the promise of repairs. Towards that end, NYCHA created a “Blueprint for Change” with two programs aimed at privatizing the projects. The first program is the misnamed Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT), which is NYCHA’s local implementation of the federal RAD program. PACT creates “partnerships” with private, for-profit developers and management companies, forcing tenants to sign leases with these new private landlords, who will have the power to raise rents and evict tenants. 75 housing projects in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx have apartments that have either been converted to or are in the process of being converted under RAD/PACT privatization.
The second program, approved by the New York state government in June 2022, is the NYCHA Housing Preservation Trust. Under the Trust, up to 25,000 of NYCHA’s 176,000 apartments could come under the authority of the Trust. The majority of the Trust’s board will be made up of officials and appointees from NYCHA and the Mayor’s office. Apartments under the Trust’s authority will be converted to Section 8 housing, just like under the RAD/PACT program. The Trust will rely on private lending backed up by federal dollars, but the fine print shows the estimated $500 million needed in federal funding doesn’t currently exist, and even if it does materialize it could be cut off in the future. And if a development held in the Trust falls behind on the debt owed, private investors could foreclose and gain more control over the management of the buildings.
Each development will get to vote between PACT, the Trust, or “Reject PACT and Trust”. But this vote is illegitimate – only 20% of heads of household in a given development would need to take part in the vote for a decision to be made in that development. The only options they’re giving people are to either sell out NYCHA tenants and buildings or keep the decrepit and unsafe conditions.
Government officials, including Mayor Adams, are trying to sell NYCHA residents on the Blueprint, RAD/PACT, and the Trust by claiming that more repairs will get done and tenants will be protected from evictions. But a study by Humans Rights Watch found that at Ocean Bay (Bayside) and Betances Houses, two of the six NYCHA projects privatized under RAD/PACT, the eviction rate skyrocketed. Moreover, many residents under RAD/PACT complained that repairs weren’t getting done and that their new landlords had no real accountability to their tenants.
Another good reason not to trust the Trust, the Blueprint, or anything NYCHA says is the mastermind behind it all: Greg Russ. In 2019, Greg Russ was hired as the head of NYCHA, with a $400,000 per year salary. Russ was the architect of the Blueprint, and was made the head of the Trust. Russ has a distinguished career of gutting, demolishing, and privatizing public housing all over the country. In Detroit, beginning in 1995, he oversaw cutting the number of public housing units in half, from 9,007 to 4,071 units. In Chicago, beginning in 1997, Russ spearheaded the demolition of all the high rise projects near downtown, displacing tens of thousands of residents. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, beginning in 2004, he presided over the complete privatization of public housing. In Minneapolis, beginning in 2017, his leadership displaced over 15,000 public housing residents. Greg Russ is the government’s best operative in the drive to privatize public housing and displace project residents; he is the friend of real estate developers and the enemy of public housing residents. That’s why we demanded: FIRE GREG RUSS!
In September 2022, Russ stepped down as CEO of NYCHA after the scandal over contaminated water at the Jacob Riis Houses, where residents refused to accept NYCHA’s cover-up. As of February 2023, Greg Russ is out for good. His exit serves as an important lesson of the collective power residents have to fight back against disrepair, neglect, and the government officials responsible for putting residents through hell.
The final pillar in the war against public housing residents is the NYPD, which has long harassed, brutalized, and criminalized youth in the projects. In recent years, the NYPD has staged “gang raids” on housing projects. In these gang raids, dozens of youth are rounded up and treated as “guilty by association,” with RICO organized crime laws used to prosecute them because they grew up around or have friends in gangs. For example, on April 27, 2016, 120 people were arrested in a gang raid on the Eastchester Gardens project and surrounding neighborhood in the Bronx; many of them were arrested simply because of who they are friends with, not any crime they committed. The defunding of public housing by Republicans and Democrats, NYCHA’s privatization programs, and the NYPD’s gang raids are all part of a concerted attack on public housing residents, a campaign of “urban cleansing” in which working-class, poor, immigrant, and Black and Latino people are being kicked out of NYC to make way for the wealthy.
But there are over 400,000 residents of NYCHA buildings, and many more people in New York suffering under a crisis of affordable housing, who can be mobilized in mass resistance to stop the privatization of NYCHA, demand that NYCHA do the repairs, and refuse to let any residents be displaced. Towards that end, Dare to Struggle is going door to door in housing projects. We are documenting the state of disrepair in NYCHA apartments. We have organized protests with residents in Queensbridge and Jacob Riis Houses. Join us in this battle that will shape the future of New York and determine whether hundreds of thousands of people have a place to live, or whether real estate developers, in league with government officials, succeed in displacing NYCHA residents so they can make even more profit.
Dare to Struggle 