New York’s has long been regarded as one of the country’s most successful public housing programs. While many other major cities have abandoned or demolished their mid-century high rises, NYCHA continues to operate at full occupancy, and more than 130,000 families sit on the authority's waiting list. More than 400,000 tenants, a full 5% of the city's population, live in NYCHA housing. Tenants have an average family income of $22,764 and pay an average rent of $384 per month. NYCHA also administers the country's largest Section 8 housing program, with over 90,000 private units leased using its vouchers.
http://www.plannyc.org/...
In 2006 The Community Update Newsletter reported that audits conducted by NYC Controller, Bill Thompson, uncovered more problems at NYCHA.
http://www.comptroller.nyc.gov/...
"These audits show significant weaknesses in the Authority’s ability to manage two of its most basic functions – planning for capital improvements with minimal tenant disruption and maintaining an accurate waiting list," Thompson said. "As NYCHA looks to increase its tenant fees to compensate for reduced Federal funding, it must ensure that it is spending its dollars prudently.
http://comptroller.nyc.gov/...
NYCHA’s goal is to provide decent and affordable housing for low- and moderate-income City residents.
At the time NYCHA managed and maintained about 345 housing developments in the five boroughs, with more than 181,000 units for nearly 420,000 residents. At the end of February 2006, there were 135,875 families on the waiting list for conventional public housing.
http://www.nyc.gov/...
Today, a total of 641,856 New Yorkers are served by NYCHA’s Public Housing and Section 8 Programs. If NYCHA was a city, it would rank 19th in population size in the United States, with New York City ranked first. Based upon the 2008 New York City Housing and Vacancy Survey (HVS) and the most recent population estimate for New York City (July, 2007) respectively, NYCHA Public Housing represents 8.4% of the City's rental apartments and is home to 4.8% of the City’s population.
Daniel Millstone, blogger for The Daily Gotham, writes of the politicization surrounding NYCHA as being a Republican conspiracy. "As a result of planned policies federal, state and local subsidies for NYCHA have declined dramatically over the Bush, Pataki, Giuliani and Bloomberg years. As a result, cash for routine maintenance is drained away, fees and rents have increased and surprisingly, NYC continues, vampire-like, to suck hundreds of millions of dollars a year from NYCHA.
Public housing in NYC has for the longest time been housing for lower income workers. Under the Reagan administration, rules were revised which forced many workers out of NYCHA apartments. By raising the maximum rent from 25% of net income to 30% of gross, thousands left NYCHA because 1980s stabilized rents were lower. They were replaced by extremely poor families."
http://www.dailygotham.com/...
Jarret Murphy wrote a short history of NYCHA in January 2009 saying that NYCHA knew from the beginning that income required to support authority activities could not be provided by rents paid by low income tenants alone.
http://www.cityhallnews.com/...
"NYCHA is spending more on its employees each year despite a shrinking workforce, mainly because of higher benefit costs. Since 2002, the price of providing employees with benefits has risen 70 percent, as workers’ compensation and health care costs have climbed by 50 percent and pension costs have soared from $8 million to $91 million. The future looks even pricier than the recent past: Between 2008 and 2012, NYCHA expects its labor costs to more than double.
Public housing in New York might not disappear in a fire sale. It might go unit by unit as NYCHA is starved of subsidies. "This is death by strangulation," says NYCHA board member Margarita López. "Do you know how you die by strangulation? Very slowly."
Hopes for avoiding that fate rose when Barack Obama won the presidency. Obama’s position papers and the Democratic platform call for a restoration of the public housing operating subsidy. As Yonkers Municipal Housing Authority boss Joseph Shuldiner points out, the obstacle to public housing isn’t the cost, but ideology. What public housing needs, "is really a pittance," he says. 'This is less than a B-1 bomber. In the federal government, this is a rounding error. It’s a question of priorities.'"
By contrast, Alaska has an approximate population of 626,932 in 2000 and 663,661 as of 2005. Wyoming has a population of 522,830 in 2007! Wyoming is almost twice the size of New York State and Alaska is roughly 10 times the size.
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Mayor Bloomberg has long been on the leading edge of quality of life issues. In 2001 The New York Times summarized the Mayor's awareness of the problem.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
‘Mayor-elect Michael R. Bloomberg warned yesterday that quality-of-life crimes appeared to be on the rise in New York City, and announced that one of the first tasks of his administration would be ''a major effort'' to roll back such offenses as prostitution and panhandling.’
http://www.mikebloomberg.com/...
Mayor Bloomberg's record on quality of life was established during his last 2 terms as Mayor.
"New York cannot continue to grow and thrive if its residents do not feel good about the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Because of Mike’s aggressive focus on improving New Yorkers quality of life, the people’s choice is clear: New York continues to grow because the quality of life under Mike Bloomberg has improved."
In July 2004, Fred Goodman reported on the Mayor's campaign against noise, "Bloomberg says this measure is responsive, stemming from the fact that the city’s 311 hotline gets more calls about noise—around 1,000 a day—than about anything else.
The problem with legislating noise is apparent in the rest of the bill, which is long on details for imposing fines on nightclubs and ice-cream trucks (the proposal’s bah-humbug low point) and ticketing citizens for their barking dogs and monster-bass auto stereo systems, while remaining disappointingly short on guidelines for the big boys, especially the airplanes and trains that plague the outer boroughs. Just ask somebody who’s suffering through a ball game at Shea while La Guardia’s flights roar overhead if he’s concerned about how loud Mister Softee is, and you’ll see why Bloomberg is often seen as out of touch.
In fact, things like ice-cream trucks produce very few 311 complaints. The biggest beef is noisy neighbors. It’s hard to say whether we’ve grown more sensitive or more petty (I suspect that dogs bark just as loudly in Fairfield County), but it remains obvious that living in close proximity—and the noise that entails—is a defining part of city life. Even serious enforcement of the code is unlikely to change that."
http://nymag.com/...
"Michael Bloomberg’s much-ballyhooed pitch to revise the city’s noise code for the first time in 32 years gives him a quality-of-life crusade in the tradition of Rudy Giuliani. But while the noise plan may turn out to be a winner, staking his political life on comparisons to Giuliani is a losing proposition. "
Mayor Bloomberg believes that it is important, during these difficult economic times, to safeguard the health of our communities so that the city does not return to the 1970s, when our leaders failed to invest in the city’s future and our quality of life deteriorated dramatically.
Determined not to make that mistake again, Mike will:
• Stabilize neighborhoods hit by foreclosures – Through the Neighborhood Stabilization Program, the City will purchase and redevelop foreclosed properties that might otherwise become neighborhood blight and a haven for criminals.
• Continue to crack down on quality of life crimes – To make sure that New Yorkers continue to enjoy a high quality of life, Mike is sponsoring new legislation to crack down on the "Dirty Dozen" – each borough’s twelve worst quality of life offenders.
The City is purchasing and redevloping foreclosed properties for whom?
In the same blog cited above, Daniel Millstone reported that Mary Brosnahan, Executive Director at Coalition for the Homeless, recently criticized NYCHA's failure to make more of its vacant apartments available to homeless families. People who want to get into public housing get on a list and, like in the movie Casablanca, they, wait and wait and wait. Unless an applicant has a 'priority' (domestic abuse victim, for example) the standard wait for a NYCHA apartment is 10 years, I am told by people who work with NYCHA residents and those seeking to move in (With an emergency priority, some get an apartment in as little as one year 'essentially they jump the line, making everyone else' wait longer.). One consequence of the appallingly long wait-lines is that people who are homeless move in with friends or family doubling or tripling up.
What would the average person say if the entire population of Wyoming or Alaska was dependent on public housing? I think there would be outrage at a collapse of planning, management and accountability at federal, state and local levels. Having more than 600,000 persons dependent on NYCHA should be equally outrageous.
With waiting periods up to 10 years, families waiting for NYCHA housing services could raise entire families without being housed. Does New York City government view this as a quality of life issue? Families raised without housing are probaby more likely to be involved in prostitution, panhandling and other crimes, than families with housing.
Noisy Neighbors?
In July 2009 The New York Real Estate Lawyer's Blog reported that The Department of Buildings' Queens Quality of Life Unit is unable to address thousands of quality-of-life complaints involving illegal home conversions because inspectors are unable to gain access to private properties, according to a new audit by New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr.
http://www.nyrealestatelawblog.com/...
"Thompson's audit found that the Unit attempted to inspect all 8,345 properties for which it received a complaint of an illegal conversion during Fiscal Year 2008. The audit also showed that the Unit attempted to perform inspections within the required time frame in 96 percent of complaints received."
Is New York City able to solve its housing dilemma using existing tactics and strategies? Waiting for NYCHA housing is worse than a mere inconvenience. What would you suppose would happen if one out of three families in Wyoming or one out of five families in Alaska was on a housing waiting list for three or more years?
Jarret Murphy recalls,"When the federal government began funding public housing in 1934, New York City led the way. The city was so eager to build housing that it moved even before federal funds were available, setting up its own housing authority (with a socialist on the board), which completed First Houses on the Lower East Side—the first public housing in America—in 1935."
http://www.nyc.gov/...
Mayor Bloomberg released his sustainability agenda, PlaNYC 2030, two years ago. The assumption driving the PlaNYC initiative was that New York City’s population would grow by one million people by the year 2030. In the booming economy of 2007, this projection of constant growth seemed reasonable, and visual evidence in the form of new housing development sprung up on nearly every corner.
However, much has changed since 2007. The foreclosure crisis has hit the city (particularly the outer boroughs), and continuing Wall Street layoffs are wreaking havoc on the city’s tax base. Construction seems to have come to a near-complete halt, and newly-completed housing sits empty. Current conditions beg the question, will New York City continue to grow after all?
http://communitybasedplanning.wordpr...
Is there a discussion about the quality of life in New York City?
Many cities rely on government programs, universities and stable industries, such as health care, to anchor employment in a fleeting economy. These characteristics are common among cities selected in the Kiplinger’s 2009 Best Cities list.
http://www.kiplinger.com/...
How does New York City compare to other US cities? Oddly enough, despite its size, wealth and reputation, New York City did not make Kiplinger’s Top 10 Best US Cities. New York City is a global city. The Mercer Survey provides a ranking of 50 international cities for 2009. Honolulu, HI was the highest ranked US city at 29; followed by San Francisco, CA at 30; Boston, MA at 35 and New York, NY at 49.
http://www.mercer.com/...
Other surprising assessments of quality of life that "US Cities Rank Poorly in International ‘Quality of Life Rankings’" are in agreement with the Mercer Survey.
http://www.cityrank.ch/...
http://www.consumerenergyreport.com/...
Jamieson Champion’s study of the quality of life in US in July 2008, Workers World begins with," U.S. imperialism’s proponents are fond of characterizing the U.S. as a land of "freedom and opportunity." This myth is shattered by the findings in a recently published study that uses U.N. research methodology to analyze socioeconomic conditions in the U.S. The study, published July 16, is titled, `The Measure of America: American Human Development Report 2008-2009.` In it, researchers analyze the comparative ability of U.S. residents to access healthcare, education, employment and housing.
Of the 30 richest countries comprising the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the U.S. has the greatest proportion of children living in poverty. Despite spending more money per capita on health care than any other country on the planet, the U.S. ranks 42nd globally in life expectancy.
U.S. infant mortality ranks 34th globally, according to the OECD report. If the U.S. were able to achieve an infant mortality rate as low as top-ranked Sweden, 20,000 more babies would survive here each year."
http://www.workers.org/...
How well is New York City positioned to invite 1 million more inhabitants by 2030? Who the Mayor will be at that time is unpredictable, but if New York City is ranked 49 out of 50 today, how will 1 million more inhabitants improve the quality of life using current levels of quality there today as a baseline?
There is a controversy over panhandling. It is not unique to New York City, or the United States. The largesse of the United States reaches every corner of the globe. Corrupt politicians, governments and corporations have pocketed billions. The trickle that is accessible to panhandlers is insignificant in comparison to corporate bailouts and executive bonuses we’ve just seen taxpayers handout.
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In some areas prostitution is legal and regulated. Some of this controversial activity has touched participants in the highest echelons of American society. There are many attempts to arrive at solutions to the problem. It is a quality of life issue that has several different dimensions.
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"Bill Thompson is committed to supporting New York City's women. He has been a staunch advocate for women's health and reproductive rights, pay equity and diversity in the work place. Bill has also worked to ensure that city agencies are providing necessary and required services to women throughout all five boroughs."
http://www.thompson2009.com/...