Is there a Santa Claus, Virginia? Do bunnies really lay Easter eggs?
Will anyone ever really fix the disaster that are the NYCHA buildings?
After all the years of what could easily be termed criminal neglect, NYCHA buildings continue to decay.
After all the Mayors: Lindsay, Beame, Koch, Dinkins, Giuliani, Bloomberg and of course, DeBlasio…
After all the Speakers of the City Council: Peter Vallone, Gifford Miller, Christine Quinn…
After all the Public Advocates: Green, Gotbaum, DeBlasio, James…
After all the City Council members with NYCHA buildings in their districts..
After the members of Congress like Maloney and Nadler,
After Senator Charles Schumer..,
After the Governors: Wilson, Cuomo, Pataki and Cuomo…
After all the years of silence and inaction and billions of Federal tax dollars – our tax dollars – the buildings continue to rot in disrepair…and no one knows why or cares. Of course the half a million tenants who live amid the horrific conditions unknown anywhere else in this city or perhaps any city in the nation, care…but always to no avail. Right here in New York.
Everyone has seen the TV coverage over the years…the apartments literally falling down..metal front doors unsafe warped from water pouring down from leaking roofs; broken walls and broken plumbing, black mold, terrible asthma rates and lead poisoning, pitch black stairwells and safety lights that don’t work, no heat from broken boilers; one-quarter of all the crime in NYC.
And then there are the hundreds of thousands of calls for repair ignored by employees who couldn’t care less…Union employees and otherwise, working men and women themselves ignoring the plight of people they should care just a little bit more about. But no one who can help, does.
POLITICAL GAMES
And now suddenly the ego needs and political fortunes of a Governor and a Mayor collide to produce what looks like the start of something big. The need of one for a strong third term reelection so he can run for President; the need of the other, reelected Mayor without serious opposition, to erase as many shortcomings as possible so that he can run for President.
First they clash over who is to blame for the decaying subway system and then over the responsibility for the decaying NYCHA.
The Governor has come to the neighborhoods and toured some buildings declaring living conditions intolerable, unlivable.
The Mayor finally fired his incompetent NYCHA chair – though in fairness – she was hired to do exactly what she did: make excuses, blame others, blame the lack of Federal funding and then desperate, lie about lead poisoning to the Mayor, the City Council and the Federal Government itself.
The Governor has promised as much as $550 million for repairs and wants $400 million from the city. The Mayor has bragged of providing 67 new roofs out of a total of 1,785 NYCHA buildings in four years.
The Governor has demanded an outside Monitor or Master to oversee construction and the hiring of an independent contractor to do the work. And by so doing offers the very first hint at what has been fundamentally wrong at NYCHA all these many years.
CORRUPTION
Billions have been processed through NYCHA through the years: to subsidize rents, pay for maintenance staff, support upkeep. The money has been spent and is long gone and yet the buildings have been ignored. Where has the money gone? Who are the contractors who received money to maintain the buildings and did not? Why have these very real problems been ignored by the entire governmental establishment: city, State, Federal?
Half a million people are involved…valuable real estate land holds decaying buildings…governments are silent.
There have been City Comptroller audits revealing lies about lead poisoning inspection, the failures to provide heat in Winter, the sale of millions of dollars worth of new kitchen and bathroom equipment and construction supplies at pennies on the dollar, the lies about responding to service repair calls which now number in the hundreds of thousands again and the fact that hundreds of playgrounds are totally broken and unusable and have gone unrepaired.
When the Governor reported he would give $50 million for roof repairs several years ago, the State Comptroller reported he would not be able to follow the money once it was given out by the State Commission on Housing and Development. He never gave the money.
Not a single Attorney-General – and we have had good ones – has looked into the expenses at NYCHA
When wide-spread lead poisoning was found throughout NYCHA and children were found to be seriously involved, two things occurred: NYCHA management lied about lead inspections – there weren’t any – and Preet Bharara, the US Attorney responsible for major political corruption breakthroughs, asked for and received four million documents from NYCHA regarding lead poisoning. He never issued a report before being replaced by the Trump Administration.
A private attempt to learn the names of contractors and to check those names against campaign donations received by a broad number of government officials failed because it was impossible to trace the names of the contractors and the donations received… and old corporate trick to hide the exact source of these donations.
Can it be proved that the fundamental problem with NYCHA is that corruption has meant that millions of dollars allotted for repairs was given to contractors who never did the work and escaped scrutiny because they were making payments to certain political campaigns?
Not at this time.
But it can be proved that there not been a single investigation of NYCHA fund expenditures in all these years. This could be the largest corruption scandal in the history of New York and yet no such investigation is underway. There is no question about that fact – and it is as obvious as it seems.
At this writing nothing has happened but talk. Senior management has been shaken up severely and no new chairperson has been selected. No Monitor has been named. No independent contractor has been hired. Not a single dollar has followed all of that talk.
We think it will. But if past is prologue…
Yes, I’ve written as much in a previous posting, yet, as a co-op shareholder/resident, I’ll reiterate. The present tenants could be sold shares at little cost of newly formed co-ops which would replace NYCHA. Politics would be relegated to co-op boards elected by shareholders. City, state and federal officials responsible for NYCHA would be relieved to have their burdens passed on to non-governmental bodies.