Residents slam NYCHA redevelopment plan in Chelsea
More than a hundred public housing tenants demanded answers from the city’s embattled Housing Authority over a controversial plan to knock down a portion of a Manhattan’s Fulton Houses to make room for private apartment towers.
The proposal is part of Mayor de Blasio’s much-ballyhooed rescue plan for NYCHA, which calls for partially privatizing the city’s public housing and redeveloping the agency’s land in a bid to pay down its eye-watering $38 billion repair bill.
“We’re scared. We’re scared sh–less,” said Yvonne Sapolis, 60, who has lived in the Fulton Houses for most of her life told city officials. “This is our home.. . We’re not trusting, we’re just not. We don’t trust you.”
NYCHA’s still-nascent plan calls for demolishing two of the Fulton Houses’ low-rise buildings in to make room for mixed-income apartment towers as a way to raise $168 million for badly needed repairs and upgrades at the rest of the complex.
The money would also pay for the construction of a third building — for new public-housing building — on the site of a playground at the complex.
City officials say the 72 families living in the buildings slated for demolition are guaranteed housing through the construction and an apartment in the new public housing building afterward.
The authority would also partially privatize the entire newly-configured project through a federal program that allows for outside investment into the Fulton Houses. Rents would remain set at 30 percent of family income.
But, the roughly 150 people who turned up made it clear throughout NYCHA’s presentation at the Lab School for Collaborative Studies that the assurances didn’t amount to much for them.
The authority’s presentation was regularly punctuated with calls of “lies” from some in the audience. That was followed by a series of tense exchanges were tenants during the question and answer session.
However, some in the audience seemed swayed by testimonials from the tenant leader of NYCHA’s partially-privatized Ocean Bay – Bayside development, which was revamped under the federal program.
“Let me see Fulton Houses be Park Avenue,” Bayside tenant leader Lolita Miller told the audience, to applause.
The Fulton Houses sit in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood, the home of the city’s booming tech scene and a spate of new luxury developments, which makes the land especially lucrative.
City Hall is turning to controversial development plans like this in a desperate bid to raise cash for the scandal-rocked Housing Authority, which is now under the eye of a federal monitor because of a lead-contamination scandal and attempts to cover up crumbling conditions.
It is part of de Blasio’s NYCHA 2.0 plan, which hopes to raise $24 billion in repairs for the agency over the next decade through partial privatization of roughly a third of NYCHA’s 175,000 apartments, air-rights sales and private development.
But even City Hall’s math shows that NYCHA will still be $14 billion short after the proposal.
More than 400,000 New Yorkers live in NYCHA’s 325 crumbling complexes, which are scattered across the boroughs.
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