NYC’s Housing Authority (NYCHA)has sold off property because, perhaps in part, it is being pushed over a fiscal brink by the combined defunding efforts of decades of GOP office holders at the city, state and federal level. (For a very cursory – but perhaps too long – overview of some of NYCHA’s financial and operating woes, click here ).

Those of you of a certain age who remember the War in Vietnam, may recall a puzzling Military concept:“we burned the village in order to save it.” Similarly, public housing operators across the US have from time-to-time destroyed huge public housing projects in order to save them. Forty years ago, for example, I spent a moderate amount of time in the Pruit-Igoe projects of St. Louis Mo.—a 33 building forest of medium-rise buildings so badly-built, so badly maintained so crime-ridden that they were torn down altogether in 1972. Since then, the dynamite & bull-dozer solution to public housing failures (and even some successes) has been applied in other locales (famously Cabrini-Green in Chicago and recently, in Staten Island). In general, NYCHA housing – even at its worst moments of disrepair and dangerousness – never equaled the disgrace of Pruitt-Igoe.

The right-wing idea is that the solution to the financial crisis in public housing (created by GOP funding decreases)is for NYCHA to become more entrepreneurial. This is standard George W. Bush pablum which has been reflected in federal housing policy of the US Department of Housing & Urban Development(HUD) since 2001: YOYO, you’re on your own.

Consistent with this policy, last week, when Sean Moss, the NY Regional Director of HUD faced the Milano-New School public housing forum, he urged NYCHA to cash in on the value of its buildings and land. The example he gave, however, shocked the audience, if not the panelists. He pointed to a large successful NYCHA project – Amsterdam Houses on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.If NYCHA could sell that now extremely valuable real estate, it would have vastly increased cash assets to build much more build affordable housing in a lower income neighborhood. In my experience, Amsterdam Houses, next to Lincoln Center, is the first choice for every NYCHA applicant. It’s no surprise that the rich would like to live there, too. If only all those poor people would be made to move. The audience, many of them NYCHA residents, gasped in alarm. Perhaps they were hearing for the first time what Mr. Bush means by “compassionate conservatism”: get out of the way! (This suggestion got a great deal of notoriety and a call, by Assembly Member Keith Wright, (who missed the event), for Mr Moss to be fired. .

Selling NYCHA Property In NYC.

NYCHA General Manager Douglas Apple, however, showed he’d heard all this before and he pointed to two places where NYCHA has done just the sort of thing Sean Moss suggested: in Staten Island and in Chelsea in Manhattan. In the SI case, structurally sound housing was abandoned while in Chelsea, unbuilt property, used as parking lots, was sold (I plan describe these deals in a future post.).

Taking stage left, Gregory Floyd, president of Teamsters Local 237 , which represents 9,000 NYCHA workers and current NYCHA resident Agnes Rivera of Community Voices Heard vigorously opposed the concept of selling NYCHA’s portfolio and promised to mobilize NYCHA residents and workers as voters to make their constituents heard. Chiming in from the right, as though part of a chorus, Manhattan Institute-NY Sun writer Julia Vittulo-Martin suggested that NYCHA sell its worst money-losing properties instead of its best and most expensive ones. The message which all accepted was that the key problem was that no more money is coming from Mr. Bush’s HUD.

While I respect both Floyd & Rivera, I think their idea of coalition of NYCHA tenants and some employees to defend NYCHA is only a start. Without more allies, many more NYCHA properties will be sold off (Indeed NYCHA plans to sell off property in the Soundview section of the Bronx .) The coalition defending public housing tenants is, at present nowhere near powerful enough to do the job. Forces and leaders who should be their key allies are equivocal. For example, DC 37 which represents the vast majority of NYC employees and endorsed Mr. Bloomberg has voiced no serious criticism of his NYCHA plans when he was running for re-election. Margarita Lopez, a well-loved lower-east former City Council Member endorsed Mr. Bloomberg for re-election and is a member of the NYCHA Board.Even for Lopez, a vocal public housing advocate, defense of NYCHA's budget was not a condition of her endorsement of Mr. Bloomberg. As I see it, tenants, union leaders (and their members) and progressive New Yorkers have not yet been united to protect NYCHA's assets and operations.