How RAD Is The Next Mayor of New York City?
With the upcoming primary election in June, New York City mayoral candidates put forth their plans to better the conditions of residents living in the city’s public housing units, and whether to continue the Rental Assistance Demonstration policy.
Will the next mayor of New York City work to privatize the city’s public housing developments?
One issue front and center as Democratic mayoral candidates kick their campaigns into high gear is the New York City Housing Authority and whether to continue the current Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) policy, which hands over day-to-day workings of NYCHA from city agencies to private developers. Residents and housing advocates are concerned about the loss of deeply subsidized housing units, and the risk of tenant displacement, so it’s no surprise that this controversial policy has sparked many conversations since its inception.
Dating back to the Barack Obama-era in 2012, RAD was enacted to allow local governments to get private funds to upgrade public housing. In New York specifically, RAD is combined with federal housing aid, which makes it a public-private partnership. NYCHA has named this policy as Permanent Affordability Commitment Together (PACT), a New York version of RAD.
NYCHA, facing billions in a budget shortfall, is financially disintegrating. To address the growing backlog of monetary needs for housing, de Blasio announced in November 2018 plans to convert nearly one-third of the public housing, or 62,000 apartments, to private management in the next 10 years. This came after NYCHA CEO-Gregory Russ- said in a statement that two decades of underfunding by the federal government has resulted in a need of $32 billion for substantial upgrades and repairs like new heating systems and fixed elevators in NYCHA buildings across New York.
Kristin Hackett, an activist, scholar, educator, also a PhD candidate at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center in the environmental psychology program, is currently working on her dissertation on why RAD is not the ideal policy solution. Hackett believes public subsidies are reorganized in favor of private investors through RAD, meaning that while tenants pay 30% of the income, the rest is contributed by taxpayers. This continues the trend that takes money out of public coffers and puts them in private pockets and creates no redistribution mechanism where that money comes back to the public, according to Hackett.
“These aren’t just bad deals for tenants who are living in these buildings, although they will be most negatively, directly and violently impacted. These are actually bad deals for society,” she said.
The $24 billion funding through RAD partnership by de Blasio is unrealistic according to Fight for NYCHA, a collective of tenants, activists, artists, and housing advocates who oppose RAD. Civil Rights Attorney, Michael Sussman submitted a letter to the U.S District Court Judge William Pauley III to accept Fight For NYCHA as a third-party beneficiary to advocate residents who oppose PACT/RAD conversion.
Many residents have taken to social media and public rallies to demonstrate their opposition to this private-public partnership. A recent rally organized at Residents of the Fulton Houses in Chelsea gathered on a cold Valentine’s Day morning to rally against RAD. The residents said that the Chelsea Working Group, an inclusive community platform initiated by de Blasio to address whether the Fulton Houses, Elliot-Chelsea, and Chelsea Addition NYCHA developments would be public or private in the future, comprises mostly individuals who favor RAD. Residents said they feel locked out of the discussions, despite being promised they’d be included by the mayor. The pandemic further exacerbated this gap because of technological and language barriers that left residents feeling their efforts have largely fallen on deaf ears.
“People don’t want to be on Zoom. They can’t get on Zoom. People don’t know what Zoom is. A lot of people don’t understand what’s going on,” said Jacqueline Lara, a 19-year NYCHA resident and secretary at Fulton Houses, who organized this rally against RAD.
During a string of recent virtual forums, the RAD rose to the forefront, including at a February 22 New York City Mayoral Debate hosted by The United Clergy Coalition Association with Housing Residents First, Inc. at Pleasant Grove Tabernacle in Brooklyn. The pivotal primary election in June is consequential to NYCHA residents who have long suffered in what many say are dilapidated dwellings. As the Democratic mayoral campaigns ramp up, candidates are laying out their specific plans to address the myriad concerns relating to NYCHA housing, and strategies to better the residents’ living conditions.
“We need a mayor who understands that public housing is the single most precious housing resource we have,” Democratic mayoral candidate Shaun Donovan, former United States Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, said at the forum.
Most candidates, including Jocelyn Taylor, Carlos Menchaca, Diane Morales, and Andrew Yang have expressed resistance to the RAD program by citing tenant opposition and argument that RAD has not sufficiently taken into consideration tenants’ experiences while living in NYCHA units.
Taylor, a former NYCHA resident, was present at the Fulton Rally and said to the media exclusively that the reward for 25 years of disinvestment shouldn’t be a Section 8 certificate, which is a program that funds private landlords.
“The residents are saying ‘I have a hole in my shoes, I need new shoes.’ And they keep bringing coats,” said Taylor, emphasizing that the current mayor is proposing the wrong solutions to New York’s housing problems. Taylor says that if she’s elected as mayor, she plans to give fewer tax abatements to luxury developers and instead utilize the funds to address core issues like heat and water outages.
“We can’t take care of nice and shiny buildings when people don’t have heat and hot water. We have to re-shift that priority and put people first,” she said.
The campaign coordinator from Menchaca’s office said in an email that Menchaca does not support RAD because it removes agency protections guaranteed by Section 9, as NYCHA residents’ transition to Section 8. This negatively impacts their relationship with public housing because tenants lose their protection, it invites a private entity to engage with residents and more evictions have taken place under RAD. It also pushes conversation toward the privatization of public housing.
“In this pandemic, we need to invest the capital dollars necessary to fix apartments and keep the promise of public housing alive. As someone who was born in public housing, I will keep fighting for it,” Menchaca’s campaign coordinator, Brendan Delaney, wrote on behalf of Menchaca.
Instead of RAD, Menchaca, a representative of the New York City Council for the 38th District, which includes Brooklyn neighborhoods of Sunset Park, Red Hook, and parts of Borough Park, among others, is committed to fully funding NYCHA from the city’s capital budget and keeping public housing public by defunding the New York Police Department by $3 billion and trimming the bloated budgets in the Department of Education, his office said.
On the other hand, mayoral candidate Kathryn Garcia, former NYC Department of Sanitation Commissioner, supports RAD as a solution because RAD transforms the apartments from ones that are molding and have lead issues to homes that are healthy environments, where residents are proud to live, she said to the media at the forum.
“There are over 400,000 open workloads at NYCHA right now. That’s more than two per unit. We don’t need another plan for NYCHA, but just stick to RAD,” Garcia said, referencing the open request for housing fixes like heat and water outages at the mayoral debate forum.
Anthony Sanchez, a six-year resident at Hope Garden in Bushwick Brooklyn, said communication between tenants and Pinnacle City Living, the private developer of his NYCHA building went downhill after a RAD transition. Unlike the process with NYCHA, there is no comprehensive service ticket system under RAD that logs a tenant’s complaint. With no track records, residents like Sanchez have to constantly call management to address housing concerns, sometimes taking several weeks to close a complaint. The home renovations promised upon signing the partnership haven’t happened either, said Sanchez.
“If this was a professional site or site with a contractor that was privately solicited by a much more affluent community, they would not be hired back. Their work would not have been approved,” he said.
RAD also came up at the February 27 Mayoral Forum for Tenants Rights, organized by the MET Council on Housing, a tenants’ rights membership organization. Diane Morales, the former CEO of Phipps Neighborhoods, a not-for-profit manager of affordable housing, talked about how RAD has “failed to keep up with the policies” it has pledged to the tenants.
“We have seen an increase in eviction rates in Ocean Bay. We see it happening in Bushwick,” Morales said, in reference to the eviction rates post RAD conversion. “It is having a disproportionate adverse effect on the residents.”
Jasmin Sanchez, a lifelong NYCHA resident and was present at the Fulton rally, said that it’s common for residents to share their distrust in the housing authority.
“For us it’s fear that when we privatize people are going to be displaced. And we look at that historically how things happen in this community. When areas get gentrified and prices skyrocket and we see that apartments are at a market value above the AMI,” Sanchez said, referencing the Area Median Income, which is the combined average household income in a specific area. “Things of that nature make communities no longer livable for working-class families,” she added.
